DZIVA
The Pool · The Deep Water · Guardians of Rivers · Varidzi Vemvura · Vaera Save
From the ancient Kalanga-Hungwe migration that brought water as identity onto the plateau, through the njuzu spirit world that only the Dziva can fully navigate, to Morgan Tsvangirai known to his people simply as “Save.” The water does not hurry. It finds its way. So will you.
Foreword — From Tete Getty
A Word Before We Begin
This handbook was written for every Dziva person who has carried the name of water all their life without knowing how deep that water goes. The Dziva is not simply a pool. It is the place where the sky meets the earth in reflection, where the visible world meets the invisible one, where the living communicate with the ancestors through the medium that both worlds share. You are the people of that threshold.
The Dziva totem is traced to the second Bantu migration wave to cross the Zambezi — arriving around 800 CE, before the Shoko Mbire builders of Great Zimbabwe, carrying with them an identity rooted not in an animal’s power but in the power of water itself. And it holds three different totem animals simultaneously — the fish eagle (hungwe), the hippo (mvuu), and the fish (hove). This is unique in the Shona system. They did not simply claim one creature. They claimed the entire ecosystem of the sacred pool.
What Is Dziva?
Dziva means pool or deep water — specifically the kind of still, deep pool that forms in the bends of rivers, at the base of waterfalls, in the rocky basins of the plateau. The dziva is not a puddle. It is the deep water — dark-bottomed, still-surfaced, its depth unmeasurable by eye. It is the water that has been there longer than any person can remember and will be there longer than any person can imagine. It is the water that the njuzu spirits call home.
Most of Zimbabwe’s totems name an animal. The Dziva names a landscape feature. This is not a lesser identity — it is a more ancient one. Reaching back to the earliest understanding that water is the source of all life, the connector between worlds, the substance through which the living and the ancestral communicate.
The only major Shona totem that names a natural feature rather than an animal. Depth, reflection, stillness, and the ability to hold whatever the sky offers.
The fish eagle, hippo, and fish — the complete water world claimed in its entirety. Unique in the Shona totem system.
Arrived around 800 CE — before Great Zimbabwe was built. Among the oldest continuous communities on the plateau.
The njuzu — water spirits who train the most powerful healers — have a special relationship with Dziva people. The water custodians are the natural intermediaries between the spirit world and the human world.
Their totem-based covenant is environmental: they protect every river, lake, spring, and waterfall. Zimbabwe’s original water quality authorities.
Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister was Dziva — born in Buhera, the Dziva heartland. Known among his own people simply as “Save.” The river named him. He answered to it all his life.
Three Sacred Animals — One Totem
No other major Shona totem holds three different totem animals across its branches. The Dziva is the complete ecology of the sacred pool: what flies above the water, what rules its surface, and what lives in its depths. In claiming all three, the Dziva people did not choose a symbol. They chose a world.
Zimbabwe’s national bird. The Dziva/Hungwe branch honours this bird. Chiefs of this lineage may transmigrate into the fish eagle after death. The Zimbabwe Bird on the flag and coat of arms may be their ancestral emblem.
The Great Pool branch honours the hippo — the lord of the river surface. Chirombo chinobvundura mvura — the animal that makes the water tremble. Dziva Guru people do not eat hippo.
The Small Pool branch honours fish. Their taboo extends to certain sea creatures through the eastern sea covenant. Their mythological sea fish — inexhaustible, sacred — encodes both ocean memory and conservation ethic.
A Dziva Totem at the Heart of the Nation
The Zimbabwe Bird — the soapstone sculptures at Great Zimbabwe’s Hill Complex, now on the national flag and coat of arms — depicts a human-bird fusion figure that fits precisely with the Dziva/Hungwe ancestral belief that chiefs transmigrate into fish eagles after death.
The Zimbabwe Birds may be the Dziva/Hungwe people’s ancestral portrait, carved before the Soko Mbire builders arrived. Every Dziva person who sees the Zimbabwe flag may be seeing their own ancestral totem.
The Second Migration — The Dziva Arrives Before Great Zimbabwe
Before Great Zimbabwe was built. Before the Soko Mbire civilisation arrived. Before Nyatsimba Mutota marched north to found the Mutapa Empire — there were the Dziva people. The second Bantu migration wave to cross the Zambezi, carrying with them an identity rooted in water, in the fish eagle, and in a spiritual relationship with the eastern sea.
The word Kalanga means “from the east” — from where the sun comes from. The Kalanga/Dziva people arrived on the plateau carrying the memory of the Indian Ocean coast. Their detembo still references eastern sea water as the only water appropriate for certain ritual purposes — a memory of the ocean preserved across a thousand years of landlocked plateau life.
The Tonga, the first Bantu migration wave, cross the Zambezi and establish settlements along the valley. They hold the oldest continuous ancestral presence in Zimbabwe’s landscape.
The Dziva people cross the Zambezi from the northeast, carrying the fish eagle, the pool, and the memory of eastern sea water. They establish communities across the central and eastern plateau — particularly in the Save River country. Kalanga — people of the east, people of the sunrise.
The Shoko Mbire builders arrive to find the Dziva/Hungwe/Kalanga already settled. The Zimbabwe Bird soapstone sculptures may represent the fish eagle identity of the Dziva people who were already there.
When the Shumba Murambwi chief Tavengegwei wanted to settle in Chivi, he married a daughter of Chief Nyaningwe-Dziva to secure that right. The Dziva’s established presence gave legitimacy to the Shumba’s expansion.
Born on 10 March 1952 in Buhera — the heart of Dziva country, on the banks of the Save River. His people would call him Save. The water had always known his name.
The Save River — The Heart of Dziva Country
There is a river in Zimbabwe that the Dziva people know as their ancestral address. It rises in the eastern highlands, flows southeast through the plateau, crosses into Mozambique, and empties into the Indian Ocean north of Beira. Its name is the Save — and the Dziva people who live along its length are known, simply and proudly, as vaera Save. They are the Save’s children. They are the water’s own.
The Save River is 740 kilometres long. Along its banks in Buhera, Chikomba, Chivu, Chipinge, Birchennough Bridge, Checheche, and Nikita — these are Dziva communities. Their ceremonies happen at the river. Their ancestors were buried in its valley. Their identity is inseparable from the water that runs through their landscape.
The Branches of the Water
Every branch of the Dziva family is a tributary of the same river. The chidawo names are not separations. They are the river’s names for its own tributaries.
| Chidawo | Sacred Animal | Territory | Key History |
|---|---|---|---|
| Musaigwa | Hove (Fish) — Dziva Diki | Zvishavane; Chivi District; Masvingo Province | Chief Nyaningwe was the established authority in Chivi. The founding Shumba Murambwi chief Tavengegwei married Nyaningwe’s daughter to secure the right to settle in the area — the Dziva’s presence gave legitimacy to the Shumba’s expansion. |
| Sambiri / Ganda | Mvuu (Hippo) — Dziva Guru | Save River country; Buhera and surrounding areas | “VeGanda gobvu, vari KwaSave” — those of the great pool, of the Save River. Their praise invokes the mvuu and the great river. Chirombo chinobvundura mvura. |
| Muyambo | Mvuu (Hippo) — Dziva/Mvuu | Zimbabwe-Mozambique border; Manica Province | Vanyaushe people originating from Mbire. Split by the colonial border of 1890. Chief Ndima governs the Zimbabwean side. Governed entirely by elder council — no svikiro in succession. |
| Mbano | Mbano (Eel/water snake) | Mashonaland; Goromonzi area | Falls under Dziva/Siziba totem. The mbano is an eel-like fish living in deep water. Mbano Matemavi people of Goromonzi District — praise references the Nhora River and the Dzimwe area. |
| Hungwe | Hungwe (Fish Eagle) | Eastern Zimbabwe; Kalanga communities | Zimbabwe’s national bird. Eastern Hungwe Kalanga treated eastern sea water as ritually sacred. Chiefs believed to transmigrate into fish eagles after death. Most strongly associated with the Zimbabwe Bird soapstone sculptures. |
Dziva Guru and Dziva Diki
The community’s own oral tradition states it plainly: “Vaviri kune Dziva guru neDziva diki. Vaera mvuu ndeveDzivaguru, vaera hove ndeve Dziva diki.” — “There are two kinds, the Great Pool and the Small Pool. Those who honour the hippo are of the Great Pool; those who honour the fish are of the Small Pool.”
Two Dziva Guru people cannot marry each other — but a Dziva Guru person and a Dziva Diki person can, because their specific ancestral lines diverge at the chidawo level. A Dziva Guru person does not eat hippo meat; a Dziva Diki person does not eat the specific fish their branch honours. Different covenants with different creatures. Both are sacred.
The Njuzu — Spirits of the Deep Water
There is a world beneath the surface of the deep pool. You cannot see it with ordinary eyes. You cannot enter it without permission. But if you are Dziva — if water is your identity and the pool is your ancestral address — then you stand at the threshold of that world in a way that no other totem can quite match. The njuzu are not afraid of the Dziva. They recognise them.
What Lives Where the Light Does Not Reach
In Shona cosmology, the deepest pools are inhabited by spirits called njuzu — half human, half fish. She grooms healers. She trains n’anga. She takes people into the water for a period of intensive learning — sometimes up to a year — and returns them with gifts of healing that no ordinary education can provide.
The family of a person taken by a njuzu must not mourn. They must pour libations to the water spirits, announcing that the person has gone temporarily to the spirit world. When the person returns — found sitting on a riverbank — they carry gifts: the ability to diagnose illness, to identify spiritual causes of misfortune, to communicate with the ancestral world through water. The most powerful n’anga in Shona tradition are often those who have been trained by a njuzu.
Prof Chigwedere’s documentation of the eastern Hungwe Kalanga is specific: “Some of their chiefs may transmigrate into Hungwe Birds after death but others might choose to transmigrate into fish or hippos or crocodiles or whales or even crabs.” When a Dziva person sees a hippo in a pool, they may be looking at an ancestor. When they see a fish eagle rise from the water, they may be receiving a message. The pool is not just an ecosystem. It is a communication channel.
The Eastern Sea Covenant
Among all the specific characteristics of the Dziva totem, one stands out as truly extraordinary: their most ancient spiritual covenant is not just with the pools and rivers of Zimbabwe’s interior. It is with the eastern sea — the Indian Ocean. In a landlocked country, the Dziva people preserved a ritual memory of the ocean. They remembered the sea. The sea did not forget them.
Historian Aeneas Chigwedere documents: “They treated water as sacred for ritual purposes. And theirs was not all water or any water but specifically eastern sea water which meant either the Red Sea or Indian Ocean water. Indeed the tribe treated this water as divine and practically no ritual was conducted without it.”
The Dziva people arrived on the Zimbabwe Plateau around 800 CE, from the northeast. Their oral tradition preserved the memory of the eastern sea — a body of water that most of their descendants would never see in their lifetimes. The belief was strong enough to sustain a logistics chain of obtaining ocean water for ceremonies across centuries. The Dziva people remembered the ocean when the ocean was too far to see.
Morgan Tsvangirai — The Man Called Save
The River Knew Him Before the World Did
Morgan Richard Tsvangirai was born on 10 March 1952 in Buhera — the heart of the Dziva Save River country. He became Zimbabwe’s most enduring opposition leader, Prime Minister from 2009 to 2013, and the man who challenged Robert Mugabe’s three-decade grip on power with a stubborn, patient, non-violent commitment that his own people recognised as the water’s quality: not the loudest force in the landscape, but the one that, given time, finds its way through every obstacle.
They called him Save. Not Morgan. Not MT. Save. Named after the great river that is the Dziva heartland. The river had always known.
He was beaten in police detention — cracked skull, blood transfusions. Charged with treason multiple times. Lost two presidential elections under conditions described internationally as fraudulent. Watched his wife Susan die in a car accident in 2009. And he came back. Every time, the water came back.
He died of colon cancer on 14 February 2018 in Johannesburg, aged 65. The Save River is still running. The pool is still deep. The Dziva people continue.
Chapter Ten
The Original DNA System
The Depth of the Water — What the Pool RemembersThe pool holds everything that has ever entered it. The rain that fell last season. The fish that were born in it and died in it. The reflected sky from a thousand mornings. A pool does not choose what to remember. It holds everything. This is the Dziva’s gift to the totem system: the quality of total retention.
The Dziva’s three-animal structure is itself a form of genealogical encoding. When you know which of these animals your specific branch honours, you know which stream of the Dziva river you come from, whether you are Dziva Guru or Dziva Diki, which other Dziva people you can and cannot marry. The biological kinship data is stored in the animal and in the chidawo — just as a genetic haplogroup is stored in the Y-chromosome.
Quick Reference
Key Terms & Lineages at a Glance
| Term | Language / Origin | Meaning / Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Dziva | Shona | Pool or deep still water — the landscape feature that is this totem’s name. Unlike all other major totems, Dziva names a place rather than an animal. |
| Hungwe | Shona | Fish eagle — Zimbabwe’s national bird; the Dziva/Hungwe branch’s totem. Chiefs may transmigrate into the fish eagle after death. Possibly the Zimbabwe Bird soapstone sculptures at Great Zimbabwe. |
| Mvuu | Shona | Hippopotamus — totem animal of the Dziva Guru (Great Pool) branch. Chirombo chinobvundura mvura — the animal that makes the water tremble. |
| Hove | Shona | Fish — totem animal of the Dziva Diki (Small Pool) branch. Their taboo extends to certain sea creatures through the eastern sea covenant. |
| Dziva Guru / Dziva Diki | Shona | The Great Pool (hippo/Sambiri) and Small Pool (fish/Musaigwa) branches — different marriage restrictions and ceremonial obligations. |
| Musaigwa | Shona | Most widely documented Dziva chidawo; VaNgowa tribe of Zvishavane; Hove (fish) branch; Save River and Ngezi River areas. |
| Sambiri / Ganda | Shona | Dziva Guru chidawo; hippo branch; “VeGanda gobvu, vari KwaSave” — those of the great pool, of the Save River. |
| VaEra Save | Shona | “The Save River people” — the communal honorific for Dziva communities along the 740km Save River. |
| Njuzu | Shona | Water spirits inhabiting the deepest pools; half human, half fish; they select and train the most powerful healers. The Dziva people are their closest neighbours and intermediaries. |
| Kalanga | Shona / Regional | “From the east / from where the sun comes” — the name for the Dziva/Hungwe people who arrived as the second Bantu migration wave around 800 CE. |
| Jekausiye | Shona | “Cut enough for your family and leave the rest” — the sacred sea fish of Dziva mythology; encodes both ocean memory and conservation ethic. |
| Morgan Tsvangirai — “Save” | Name / Totem honorific | Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister (2009–2013); born 1952 in Buhera; known by his own people as “Save” — his totem honorific, named for the river of his ancestral homeland. |
Be the Pool. Be Still Enough to Reflect the Sky.
Water is the most patient force in the world. It does not fight the rock directly. It finds the crack. It flows through the crack. It widens the crack, year after year, until the rock opens. This is not weakness. This is a form of strength so enduring that the rock does not even notice it happening until one day the water has made a canyon where there was once a wall. This is you. This is the Dziva.
You carry the second wave. The Dziva/Hungwe/Kalanga arrived on this plateau around 800 CE — before Great Zimbabwe was built. The Zimbabwe Bird that your nation chose as its symbol — on the flag, on the money, on every official seal — may be your ancestral totem, carved in soapstone by the people who came before the stone city’s builders.
If you are Dziva Musaigwa — know that Chief Nyaningwe’s established presence in the Chivi area was so recognised that even the expanding Shumba Murambwi dynasty had to marry into your family to gain the right to settle in your territory. You were there first. Your presence was the legitimacy that others sought.
If you are Dziva Sambiri Ganda — know that your praise name opens with the great pool, with the hippo who makes the water tremble, with the Save River that is your ancestral address. Vari KwaSave — of the Save. That river is still running.
Know that Morgan Tsvangirai — the man born in Buhera who faced a tyrant for twenty years and would not break — was yours. A Dziva person. A Save River child. The water did not give him his courage as a gift. The water IS courage of a specific kind — the kind that does not shout and does not quit and does not stop coming back, year after year, flood after flood, until the stone opens.
Maita vaera Mvuu, vaera Hove, vaera Hungwe.
Maita vaera Save — the Save River people.
Dziva reMvura — the pool of water, from the beginning.
Be the pool. Be still enough to reflect the sky clearly.
Be deep enough to hold what others cannot.
Be patient enough to outlast the drought.
And when the rain comes — and it always comes —
be ready to overflow.
The pool holds. The pool remembers.
So do you.
Daughter of Changamire Dombo I
Custodian of the Zimbabwe Heritage Series · Volume VI of XXIII
TeteGetty.com
Research informed by: Zimtribes.com · TotemNetwork.blogspot.com · ZimbOriginal.com · ZimProfiles.com · Zichivhu.blogspot.com · The Patriot Zimbabwe (Chigwedere documentation) · SpeakShona.com · ShonaScupture.gallery · Wikipedia (Morgan Tsvangirai) · VOA Zimbabwe · Al Jazeera · Britannica · Prof Aeneas Chigwedere, The Great Zimbabwe State and Its Off-Shoots.
Vol I: MOYO · Vol II: SHUMBA · Vol III: MHOFU · Vol IV: SOKO · Vol V: NZOU · Vol VI: DZIVA · VII: GUMBO · VIII: TEMBO · IX: NGARA · X: GWAI · XI: NYATI · XII: HUMBA · XIII: HUNGWE · XIV: MHARA · XV: BETA · XVI: GARWE · XVII: MBEVA · XVIII: NHETA · XIX: MVUU · XX: TSIVO · XXI: BONGA CHIHWA · XXII: MHEMBWE · XXIII: INGWE
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