Mashonaland Central

This is where the Shona state that followed Great Zimbabwe made its home, where a Jesuit was strangled at a king's court in 1561, where the spirit medium Nehanda lived, and where the shooting war for Zimbabwe began on a farm near Centenary in December 1972. The farms and small towns north of Harare carry more of the country's story than the empty signposts suggest.

1. 1200s to 1400s

   Small dry-stone enclosures at Chisvingo, Nhunguza and Ruanga in the hills north of Harare are built in the same style of walling as Great Zimbabwe, and Garlake found the finds at Nhunguza culturally identical with Great Zimbabwe's of the same period. They may have been the seats of minor provincial chiefs as the Zimbabwe state spread its power north in the 14th and 15th centuries. Peter Garlake, who excavated Nhunguza in 1969, thought it may have been lived in for only about a generation. source

2. About 1420 to 1450

   Shona tradition says Nyatsimba Mutota, sent north from the Great Zimbabwe area to look for salt, settled the first capital at Zvongombe, 10 km east of today's Centenary. The site is believed to have been settled around 1450. From it grew the Mutapa state (Mwenemutapa, Munhumutapa), whose early capitals lay in the Dande and Musengezi country below the escarpment. Mutota's Ruin, Kasekete and Zvongombe are all national monuments. source

3. 1561

   The Portuguese Jesuit Gonçalo da Silveira reached the Mutapa court, baptised the ruler Negomo and his mother and hundreds of his nobles, then fell out of favour as Muslim traders and courtiers turned the king against him. In March 1561 he was strangled and his body thrown into the Musengezi River. Portugal sent Francisco Barreto with an army to conquer the Mutapa (it reached Sena by 1571 and failed), and by 1629 the Mutapa was a Portuguese vassal. source

4. 1870s to 1880s

   Kanyemba, the village at Zimbabwe's northern tip, takes its name from José Rosario de Andrade, a Portuguese estate holder on the Zambezi nicknamed Kanyemba, the ferocious. From the 1870s he built a private army known as the Chikunda, said to number 10,000 by the 1880s, and traded and raided across the valley. His descendants have held the chieftainship ever since. source

5. 1896 to 1898

   Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, medium of the Nehanda ancestral spirit, lived in the Mazowe hills and had at first told her people to get along with the first white settlers, who she said were only traders. In the rising of 1896 (the First Chimurenga) she and the medium Kaguvi preached war instead. Captured after the rising collapsed, she was convicted of ordering the killing of the native commissioner Henry Pollard and hanged in 1898. Kaguvi was executed too. source

6. 1894 to 1904

   Kadungure Mapondera, a chief from the Nyota Hills in Mazowe, refused the British South Africa Company's hut tax in 1894 and took his people over the border. He came back in 1900 with a force drawn from the Korekore, Tavara and others that grew past 600 men and fought a guerrilla war across Guruve, Mazowe and Mount Darwin until he surrendered on 30 August 1903. Sentenced to seven years' hard labour, he died in prison in 1904 on hunger strike. source

7. 1901 to 1927

   Bindura began as Kimberley Reefs when a gold mine opened in 1901 and took its present name in 1913 when the railway arrived. Mazowe Dam was finished in 1920 to water the citrus estates. At Shamva, a gold town the settlers had called Abercorn, African mine workers staged what was probably Rhodesia's first strike by black labour in 1927. source

8. 21 December 1972 to 1980

   At about 3 am a ZANLA unit of ten men led by Rex Nhongo (Solomon Mujuru) attacked Altena Farm near Centenary, laying a landmine in the driveway, then firing on the house and throwing grenades; the farmer's eight-year-old daughter was hurt. Many histories date the liberation war proper from that night. In the north-east people were moved into fenced protected villages, about 4,300 at Mukumbura alone by the end of 1974. The war ended at Lancaster House in December 1979 and Zimbabwe became independent on 18 April 1980. source

Languages

Shona is the language of the province, as it is across the four Mashonaland provinces (Harare counts as one), home to around half of Zimbabwe's people. Zezuru and Korekore are the most common dialects. source

The Doma

The Doma (vaDoma) of the Kanyemba country are the only traditional hunter-gatherers native to Zimbabwe. Their old homeland in the hills is now the Chewore Safari Area, and most now live settled or semi-settled lives in the lowlands, speaking Dema, a language close to Shona. A minority are born with ectrodactyly, a condition that leaves two toes on each foot, which is why older books call them the two-toed people. They resisted the Mutapa state before colonial times and have had little access to farmland since. source

Spirit mediums

Shona religion centres on Mwari, the high god, and on the mhondoro, ancestral spirits of the land who speak through a living medium (svikiro). Nehanda is the best known, and her name is still said with the title Mbuya, grandmother. Her trial papers in the National Archives were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2015, and a statue of her went up in central Harare in May 2021. source

Tobacco country

Centenary was cut out of virgin bush in 1952 for tobacco, and the leaf helped pay for its roads, schools and clinics. Mvurwi (Umvukwesi) sat in the farm belt between Banket and Shamva known as the breadbasket region, still has a tobacco market, and most people around it are now small-scale farmers. source