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communicate directly with its living descendants it chooses a man or woman to possess and become its mouthpiece.
The medium does not necessarily wish to be possessed, because indeed possession is a hardship and a trial so it is the powerful ancestors who make their choice. The medium is simply the receptacle, the vessel of the spirit. Unlike all other spirit mediums, Nehanda had two separate, equally legitimate traditions of mediums, one in the Manzou (bastardised to Mazowe by the settlers) and another in Dande.
The Nehanda from Manzou, a woman called Charwe was a fierce critic of the colonial regime and a fighter who led the 1896 rebellion against the new colonial state and when the rebellion eventually collapsed she was among the last leaders to be captured. Together with another leader of the rebellion Sekuru Kaguvi, she was sentenced to death and hanged.
Thereafter, a powerful and prolific oral tradition grew up around her name; her part in the rebellion especially the last moments of her life after she was condemned; her refusal to accept conversion to Christianity; her defiance on the scaffold and her famous prophecy that “my bones shall rise” to win back freedom from the Europeans!
Within a short space of time, the career of the medium, the healing and the protective powers associated with the spirit became inextricably fused in myth, song and verse in which Nehanda became an epitome of the inevitable but long-awaited victory of the Shona over their oppressors. She became a national inspiration and one cannot talk about the liberation of this country without talking about Mbuya Nehanda.
This brings us to the fall of the tree. The fall of Mbuya Nehanda’s tree from which the heroine was hung by the brutal and racist and illegitimate colonial administration, is surely as unfortunate as it is very significant. Coming at a time when the nation has one eye on the soil and another on the sky, and the ancestors withholding the precious liquid, it is indeed a bad omen.
This is the woman who met her brutal fate with a brave face and kicked, punched and spat as the colonialists took her to the gallows. Remember she also refused to be baptised as a Catholic at a time when one needed strength of character and depth of resistance.
Dear reader, don’t forget that significantly, she swore that famous swear that her bones would rise again and give back independence and indeed they rose and shone. They rose and shook off colonialism.
“Mandiuraya zvenyu asi mapfupa angu achamuka,” she is reported to have said to the confused and shaken white tormentors who reportedly took away her remains to some unknown place just to make sure that the sacred and inspired bones would not rise up.
Yes, bullies are cowards and stupid. The bones of the heroine were to rise in fury years later in the name of the Second Chimurenga and this spelt the demise of the colonial regime. The tree had stood at the corner of Josiah Tongogara and Sam Nujoma for over a century, defiantly telling a story in its deafening silence.
Now her heroic bones should be clanging, knocking against each other, turning and writhing in anger over what happened on Wednesday last week. It is interesting that the private media has come up with a number of conclusions chief among them: the end of an era.
Council chose not to announce to the nation that the tree had fallen. They chose not to explain how it had happened. It became one of those old trees that are falling naturally.
However, if this tree did not fall naturally, but was hacked down by an employee in an MDC-T dominated Council, what can stop us concluding that it is indicative of the regime change agenda the MDC-T has unsuccessfully pursued for the past twelve years?
What can stop any right thinking person concluding that destroying this tree is pregnant with meaning of how the MDC-T would want to rid the symbols of revolution from within us?
Wondering minds, but Mbuya Nehanda was from the Mazowe District, so was Cde David Karimatsenga, the freedom fighter and liberator who sired Locadia, the woman at the centre of harassment and emotional abuse by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s marriage circus. This explains why chief Negomo is steeped in tradition and deserves the right to whip Tsvangirai into line. That area still beholds traditions.
Our people have always said “Chisi hachieri musi wacharimwa”. When Mbuya Nehanda in 1898 said “My bones shall rise”, it sounded meaningless to the settler colonialist, but it was a statement they recorded.
When the first shots sounded in the Battle of Sinoia (Chinhoyi) in 1966, it was then that they realised that they might have killed Nehanda because of her militancy and resistance, but they had not killed her ideas.
Even Christians understand that principle. Prophet Isaiah said, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him . . .” (Isaiah 11:1-16)
What makes this villager extremely sad is that the tree was the only remaining stark reminder of Nehanda’s callous murder. To date, no one really knows where Nehanda was buried but these colonialists so much loved their own heroes so much that, even Rhodes had his body carried for a long distance to his final burial in Matopos.
Worse still, Rhodes’ grave is a national tourist attraction yet that on Nehanda has been hidden and entrapped to irrelevancy. Let us spare a thought for Nehanda for, wherever she lies interred, she must be turning and twisting in her grave with anger and disgust.