Chapter By Molly Manyonganise
Book : African Women Legends and the Spirituality of Resistance
Edition: 1st Edition
First Published: 2024
Imprint: Routledge
Pages20
eBook ISBN9781003460978
This volume focuses on African indigenous women legends and their potential to serve as midwives for gender empowerment and for contributing towards African feminist theories. It considers the intersection of gender and spirituality in subverting patriarchy, colonialism, anthropocentricism, and capitalism as well as elevating African women to the social space of speaking as empowered subjects with public influence. The chapters examine historical, cultural, and religious African women legends who became champions of liberation and their approach to social justice. The authors suggest that their stories of resistance hold great potential for building justice-loving Earth Communities. This book will be of interest to scholars of religion, gender studies, indigenous studies, African studies, African-indigenous knowledges, postcolonial studies, among others.
Nehanda: Priestess and Freedom Fighter of Zimbabwe
Abstract
The written histories of most African societies have left women largely invisible which has led feminist and womanist scholars to challenge their genderedness. Women are (re)presented as passive subjects who have not contributed much to the making of their societies. However, gender scholars have gone back to history as a way of challenging narratives that tend to invisibilize women and they have presented some women who played critical roles within their societies. This has led scholarship to reimagine the significance of women in the shaping of African history through the re-telling of the her-stories.
For example, within the religiopolitical history of Zimbabwe, Mbuya Nehanda occupies a special place. She is cited as one of the African indigenous religious figures who instigated the first Shona resistance against colonialism commonly known as the First Chimurenga, 1896–1897. Before she was killed by the colonial government of the then Southern Rhodesia (currently Zimbabwe), she declared that her bones would rise again. It is with no surprise, therefore, that the Second Chimurenga was premised on this declaration. In postcolonial Zimbabwe, her name has always been remembered as one who championed the independence of Zimbabwe. After Mugabe’s downfall, the new government immortalized her by placing her carved image at the intersection of roads named after two prominent African male nationalists namely Julius Nyerere and Samora Machel.
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explore Mbuya Nehanda’s theological thinking from the perspective of an African indigenous religious perspective. The focus of the paper is to explore how she can be constructed as a legendary figure of colonial resistance for the liberation of Zimbabwe. This is largely a desktop research which makes use of secondary sources. Theoretically, the paper employs postcolonial theory as a way of establishing the way gender can be deployed in African Liberation theologies.
