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Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, weather is a great metaphor for life — sometimes it is good, sometimes bad, and there’s nothing much one can do about it except try and read into its tapestries. There, sunshine can be delicious, rain refreshing and wind braces us up, and, it is one of the secrets of nature in its mood of mockery that weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of villagers.

Sudden change of weather, means something, and cloud cover is associated with the death of legends.
A few days just before, during and after the harmonised elections, the weather changed uncharacteristically and dramatically, too.

Those with sharp memories might have known that it rained in some parts of Zimbabwe and also became excessively cloudy and cold. It was a harbinger of bad things, an insight into an ill omen.

When this villager sought explanations, village elders and the soothsayer, the ageless autochthons of knowledge and wisdom said something was amiss.

Sooner rather than later messages started trickling through that Linah Makuyaura Govera, who had been possessed by the spirit of Mbuya Nehanda had crossed the line of this life and visited the other world. Visited? Yes, visiting was the buzz word.

Before the visit, she allegedly said: “Mugabe has won resoundingly, so I have finished by job. I am now visiting in peace. Basa ndasiya ndapedza!”

Spirit mediums Karitundundu, Madzemwa, Nyamapfeni, Nyamapfeka, Chingowo, Dumburechuma, Chimhawu, Chingowo, Mutota and Svembere, among others, spoke in secret whispers. In the open they denied the “death”. Mbuya Nehanda had visited and she would come back later, they asserted.

In Shona tradition, close circles of a spirit medium do not report the death of the medium, until after a year, when a second and final burial is held.

During that year-long period, if you ask for the medium, all the other spirit mediums will tell you, she or he visited a faraway place.
From a journalistic point of view, it was a scoop.

We needed to establish the truth.
So, this villager set out to establish the whereabouts of Mbuya Nehanda, the medium famed for exorcising and cleansing the Dzivaresekwa Army flats and Mashumbi Pools High School from haunting spirits and hysteria.

Armed with cell numbers and details of chiefs Mudzimu, Negonde and Matawu and spirit mediums involved in the Mbuya Nehanda circles, and those of the main officiant, the medium of the spirit Chimhawu, I set off in a Ford Ranger.

Sekuru Chimhawu in particular, is an interesting spirit medium.
He has a cellphone and uses his nephew to phone and receive calls. He stays in a thicket in Hangwa (Angwa), on the verges of Chiwore National Park, overlooking the Zambezi River, to the north.

In Chikuti, there was dead silence. Only whispers. Security at Mbuya Nehanda’s sacred shrine was watertight. There was no mourning.
The official message was she had visited Kwekwe. Chief Mudzimu pleaded ignorance and so did other chiefs.

My sources told me to try Sekuru Chimhawu, the main officiant and brother to the medium.
The following morning, a Saturday, this villager drove to Kazangarare, past Chitenje, Masoka and Kapirinhengo in a bad dirty road and arrived at Sekuru Chimhawu’s homestead late in the afternoon. Exhausted, dust-caked on the body of the car, there, I was face-to-face with the spirit medium.

He looked authoritative, dressed in his traditional garb and dangling a sharp spear in one hand and an axe in another.
He quickly dismissed the death of Mbuya Nehanda.

“She visited but she will not come back. She is my sister. She visited Kwekwe but if you go there you will not find her. I am speaking in deep Shona?”

This villager tried all tricks to have him use the word death but Sekuru Chimhawu was steadfast but the trick worked when this villager asked him to explain how mediums are buried.

“At death, the body is wrapped in a white cloth, carried in the stealth of the night and placed in a wooden rack built like the rack we use for storing maize in the villages, before shelling. Dara.

“The roof is not covered. The body is left exposed for a year until all the flesh drops off. Only the bones remain and exactly a year, related spirit mediums go back to the rack and collect the bones for the second burial in the ground.

“I am pained, they left me out when they buried Nehanda Nyakasikana, my sister last week at Manhenga near Lion’s Den.”
“But Sekuru you said she visited? It’s the same. That was the visit. It was done fast. They will have to explain to me how they did it, without me?

“They told me she had gone to Kwekwe. Why? I am not a kid! I am the one who should have officiated. Stories about visits are told people outside the spiritual realm circles, not me. I had to get confirmation from other spirit mediums, who attended the first burial.”
Thereafter, Sekuru Chimhawu changed the subject, realising he had let the cat out of the bag.

Unlike all other mediums, Nehanda is believed to have two separate, equally legitimate traditions of mediums, one in the Manzou (Mazowe) region near Harare, the other in Chikuti (the gold pan) near Lion’s Den.

The original headquarters of Mbuya Nehanda were at Tsokoto Shrine, at the border with Mozambique in Chidodo, north of Guruve.
The legendary medium of the Mazowe Nehanda, a woman named Chahwe, was a major leader of the 1894-96 rebellion against the new colonial state.

Despite limited resources, she led the black resistance and fought the whites with spears, bows and arrows, while the enemy used guns. When the rebellion failed she was among the last of the leaders to be captured.

Together with another leader of the rebellion Sekuru Gumboreshumba, the medium of Kaguvi, she was sentenced to death and hanged by the British on April 27, 1897 but her heroic role has made her the idol of modern day Zimbabwean revolutionaries.

It is said that, faced with the hangman’s noose, Nehanda refused to be converted to Christianity and, let alone, talk to Catholic Priest Father Ritcherz apart from reminding him that “My bones will surely rise again”. But Kaguvi converted and was christened Dismus “the good thief” the name of the thief saved by Jesus Christ on the cross.

Since the hanging in April 1900, a powerful and prolific oral tradition grew up around her name, her part in the rebellion and 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 prophecy that “my bones will rise to win back freedom from the Europeans” made her a national occult of the spiritual realm.

In time since the death of Nehanda the healing and protective powers associated with the spirit became inextricably fused.
In songs, in verse and in myth, Nehanda came to represent the inevitable but so-long awaited victory of the people over their oppressors.

As a heroine of the liberation struggle Nehanda was rivalled only by Chaminuka, a mhondoro or royal ancestor of the Zezuru people of central Zimbabwe, who came to be regarded as her spiritual brother.

In many of the new versions of old myths that grew out of the years of the struggle, this brother and sister pair is characterised as the original founders of the Shona nation.

So, has Mbuya Nehanda visited?