Nehanda Nyakasikana

Nehanda Nyakasikana was a Zezuru Shona spirit medium in what is now Zimbabwe, a woman recognized within Shona religious tradition as the living vessel of Nehanda, a powerful ancestral spirit whose pronouncements carried major religious and political authority among the Shona people. In that role she was one of the central organizing figures, alongside fellow spirit medium Sekuru Kaguvi, of the First Chimurenga of 1896 to 1897, a widespread armed uprising of Shona and Ndebele communities against the colonial rule of the British South Africa Company, in which her religious authority was used to encourage and coordinate resistance across a wide area of Mashonaland. Following the suppression of the uprising she was captured by colonial forces and tried for the killing of a local colonial official, Native Commissioner Henry Hawkins Pollard, found guilty, and hanged in Salisbury, now Harare, in April 1898, reportedly refusing conversion to Christianity to the end and predicting that her spirit and bones would rise again to continue the resistance. That prophecy became one of the most widely invoked symbols of Zimbabwe's later twentieth century nationalist and guerrilla movements against colonial and white minority rule, which explicitly drew on her memory and the First Chimurenga as a founding precedent for their own armed struggle, and she remains one of the most honored figures in modern Zimbabwean national memory, commemorated in monuments, institutions and literature.