Mbuya Nehanda, The Bones and the Statue Rising

 My people, I mean Black Zimbabweans just love to display publicly their self-hate on social media. I just love the discussions around the Mbuya Nehanda statue! Mbuya Nehanda is a spirit medium who has been with the Shona people for centuries. It is a fact that she has come out in many woman's forms and shapes over  Shona generations., but alas, some enlightened middle-class gutter journalists and social media warriors think they have a monopoly and copyright to the spirit medium image.

Our people feel they should contribute to the shape and form of Mbuya Nehanda since she is part of our heritage and a national symbol and  I am glad that we are talking. It is those that would like to silence the debate by making as much noise as possible that I hate. This is not a political distraction as some of our detractors say but a national narrative that we should pursue to its very end.

The artist, David Mutasa, who was commissioned to do the job has done an excellent job. He has captured the Mbuya Nehanda in his African and Manyika mind. What we expected was a very ugly and old Mbuya Nehanda....something that looks like  Gagool in H. Rider Haggard's book. As I have alluded earlier the Mbuya Nehandas has manifested her spirit in women of different names, shapes and sizes. the artist has done justice to all manifestations of an intergenerational image of Mbuya Nehanda.

  It is the colonial hangover in our people that make us believe that an ugly Nehanda is an appropriate statue. The colonialist has done a perfect job of showing us a tortured, raped,  and broken woman. That is what the white settler wanted the African person to believe is Mbuya Nehanda. The only colonial photograph of Nehanda as a prisoner does not do justice to her beauty and to her powers. The image does not do justice to her legacy and heroic works.

The image of an incarcerated Nehanda has been etched into our psyche so much so that some amongst us refuse to believe the possibility that she could have been a young, beautiful, well embodied and strong African woman   Let us Zimbabwean refuse to remember the last image we have of Nehanda.It was taken after she has been brutalised in prison by the white Rhodesian settlers. Let us remember Mbuya Nehanda as an African spirit that fought the colonialists in all the Chimurengas of past years. Let us remember Mbuya Nehanda in the present as we fight the counter-revolutionaries of Chimurenga.

Mbuya Nehanda still lives amongst us today.! She told the hangman that her bones shall rise and that has come to pass. The denial of this fact is the centre of this debate, not the form or shape of the statue. We have to overcome the raw self- hate pumped into us by evil white supremacists for over a century.

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