Shona Traditional Religion

Mwari made the world, sends the rain, and is invoked at the edges of Shona life much as other regional high gods are, except for one distinguishing fact: Mwari has a cult and an address. At Matonjeni in the Matobo Hills of southwestern Zimbabwe, above all at the shrine of Njelele, a voice is heard to speak from the rock, and messengers travel to it from a wide area to bring petitions about rain and receive instruction in return. No other high god described in this atlas's African material has quite this institutional shape, a fixed shrine with resident officers rather than a figure approached only through prayer and oath.

Beneath Mwari, Shona cosmology holds two classes of spirit that are not interchangeable. The vadzimu are family ancestors, consulted and thanked by their own descendants for matters within a household or lineage. The mhondoro are different in kind: territorial spirits of dead chiefs, often described as lion spirits, whose concern is the land and rainfall of an entire chiefdom rather than one family's affairs. A mhondoro speaks through a spirit medium, a svikiro, whose possession and utterance are how the community learns what the ancestor requires of it, on questions of land use, rain and public conduct that reach well past any one household. The distinction between vadzimu and mhondoro, and Mwari's position above both, is the structure Michael Bourdillon's ethnography of the contemporary Shona records as still governing rural religious life.

The bira is an all night ceremony at which the vadzimu are called to speak through a medium, and its instrument is the mbira dzavadzimu, whose name means the mbira of the ancestors. Pieces of the mbira repertoire are understood to belong to particular families and spirits rather than to composers, and the ceremony itself, not concert performance, is the setting in which the instrument does its primary religious work, calling and holding the attention of the dead until a medium speaks for them. Beer, drumming, singing and dance accompany the all night vigil, building toward the possession that is the ceremony's point.

Mhondoro mediumship has also carried weight in Shona history that reaches beyond any single village. Mbuya Nehanda, medium of a prominent mhondoro spirit, was executed by colonial authorities in 1898 for her role in the First Chimurenga uprising against early colonial rule, and her memory was invoked again by fighters during the war that ended white minority rule in Zimbabwe in 1980, an unusually direct case of a religious office being read as a source of political legitimacy across two separate anticolonial struggles eighty years apart. Most Shona people today attend church, and Bourdillon's fieldwork records the bira, the mhondoro cult and Mwari's shrine at Njelele continuing as living practice within a population that is, by simple headcount, substantially Christian.