Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana

Charwe Nyakasikana was born around 1840 in the Mazoe District of Shona country (in what is now north-central Zimbabwe). She was identified in her late twenties as the svikiro — the human medium — of the Nehanda mhondoro (lion spirit), the ancestor-spirit who in Shona religious tradition holds custodial authority over the affairs of the Zezuru-speaking peoples of the Mazoe valley. She had served as Nehanda's medium for approximately twenty-five years by 1896.

The First Chimurenga — the uprising of the Shona and Ndebele peoples against the British South Africa Company's settler occupation that had followed Cecil Rhodes's 1893 defeat of Lobengula (also placed in this archive) — began in March 1896 in Matabeleland. The Shona rising followed in June 1896. Charwe — speaking with the authority of the Nehanda spirit — was the principal spiritual sanctioner of the Shona uprising. She instructed her followers, in the religious language of the mhondoro tradition, that the European settlers had violated the spiritual covenants under which the land had been held and that the consequences would attend.

The Shona-Ndebele forces killed approximately three hundred and seventy white settlers and several hundred Black African collaborators across the first months of the rising. The BSAC military response — under the command of Major Frederick Russell Burnham and the colonial militia — used dynamiting of caves (where Shona resistance forces had retreated) and the systematic destruction of villages and food stocks to suppress the uprising over the following eighteen months.

Charwe was captured in late 1897 and tried in Salisbury for the murder of the Native Commissioner Henry Hawkins Pollard. She was convicted on the strength of her own testimony — she did not deny her role — and was sentenced to death by hanging. Her last recorded words at the scaffold were "Mapfupa angu achamuka" — "my bones will rise again."

She was hanged at Salisbury on the twenty-seventh of April 1898, age approximately fifty-eight.

The Second Chimurenga — the Zimbabwean liberation war of 1964-1979 — drew explicit spiritual authority from Nehanda's prophecy.

She is honored here as the svikiro whose 1898 prophecy founded the Zimbabwean liberation tradition.