Mutoko

Mutoko (Mtoko in colonial records) is the district town 143 km out of Harare on the A2 to Mozambique, set among granite hills. Most people pass straight through to Nyamapanda. Stop and you find a stone-walled hilltop older than the Portuguese, a cave of painted elephants, the leprosy settlement where John Bradburne lived and was killed, and the quarries that send Mutoko's black granite round the world.

1. About 200 to 1400

   Ziwa pottery from about AD 200 to 600 shows farmers on the Tere hill early. Permanent settlement probably began around AD 1000, and the coursed, mortarless stone walls were at their height between 1300 and 1400, the same time as Great Zimbabwe. source

2. 1580s to 1693

   The Portuguese set up a feira (trading fair) at Luanze, 58 km beyond Mutoko on today's A2, in the 1580s, trading for gold brought in from elsewhere. Mutapa forces attacked the feiras in 1629 and lost, and after the Rozvi ruler Changamire Dombo destroyed the Dambarare feira in 1693 the Portuguese abandoned all of them. source

3. 16th century

   The Budya (Buja) people came from Mhingari in what is now Mozambique, led by Nehoreka. Their tradition says the land was ruled by Makate, feared for his charms, until Nehoreka's sister Njapa uncovered his secret and let her brother overthrow him. Nehoreka's line became the Mutoko chieftainship, with its ritual home at Charehwa. source

4. 1891

   Frederick Courtney Selous came to Chief Mutoko to get his signature on a treaty of friendship with the British South Africa Company. Theodore Bent passed the same year. Neither mentioned the ruins, which suggests the chief was no longer living there. source

5. 1911

   Samuel Gurney opened the Methodist Episcopal Church's Mtoko mission in an old police camp the British South Africa Company gave the church, and by 1944 its boys' boarding school had nearly 100 pupils. source

6. 1929

   H. A. Wieschoff of the Frobenius expedition dug at the Tere ruins. He found gold foil, a gold amulet, Chinese celadon, iron arrowheads and knives, copper bracelets and wire, wrote a brief report and did a good deal of damage to the walling in the process. source

7. 1969 to 1979

   The Englishman John Bradburne came to the Mutemwa leprosy settlement outside town in 1969, became its warden and stayed through the liberation war, the 1970s guerrilla war against white minority rule. Guerrillas of ZANLA, the armed wing of ZANU, abducted him on 2 September 1979; he was shot and died on 5 September, aged 58, seven months before independence. source

8. Early 1980s

   After independence Mutoko was made a growth point, the government's name for a rural centre picked for investment, and today has electricity, a hospital, a post office, banks and grain and cotton depots. source

The Budya and the chief

Mutoko is Budya country, a people with their own dialect who keep the shumba (lion) totem of Nehoreka. Nehoreka's spirit speaks through a woman medium called Charehwa who keeps away from the public, and a visitor to Chief Mutoko's compound is expected to bring a gift, not to shake his hand, and (for women) not to wear trousers. source

Sacred ground

The Budya do not count the Tere ruins as their own ancestors' place; to them it is Tere raMakate, Makate's former village. Their most sacred site is Dzimbahwe, where nobody cuts trees or ploughs, and in drought the traditional leaders go up the mountain to ask the ancestors for rain while elderly women brew mukwerera beer for the ceremony. source

Tomatoes and mangoes

The Budya have a name as some of the best tomato and mango growers in the country. The resettlement farms in the area grow maize, cotton, beans and lately tobacco. source

Bradburne pilgrimage

Every year a memorial service for John Bradburne is held at Mutemwa, below Chigona Mountain, where his headstone stands. The crowd has reached 25,000, so expect the Mutemwa road to be full that day. source