Arts, Culture & History of Zimbabwe · Living Heritage
A Coloniser on a Holy Hill: The Mambos Call for Cecil Rhodes to Leave Matobo’s Sacred Malindidzimu
On Anti-Sanctions Day, Mambo Mutasa and the Mambos of Manicaland served notice: the grave of Cecil John Rhodes should be lifted from Malindidzimu, the Zimbabwe Plateau’s holiest hill. Not sent abroad — simply moved off a shrine where he was never meant to lie. And best done not by petition, but by his own family, in the dignified way the Plateau honours its dead.
There is a granite dome in the Matobo Hills that the Kalanga and the peoples of the Plateau named Malindidzimu — “the resting place of the ancestral spirits.” It is one of the most sacred places in the whole Zimbabwe Plateau civilisation. And on its very summit, by his own instruction, lies the man who seized the country that still carries the scars of his name. This Anti-Sanctions Day, Mambo Mutasa, speaking for the Mambos of Manicaland, served notice that the time has come to set that right.
Hear the call precisely, because its restraint is its power. The Mambos are not asking that Cecil Rhodes be expelled from Zimbabwe or shipped back to England. They are asking something narrower and more exact: that his remains be moved off the sacred shrine — reburied somewhere in this land that is not the spiritual heart of the Plateau’s people. A grave is a grave. It need not sit on an altar.
That a Manyika king in the east should speak for a hill in the west tells you everything about what Malindidzimu is. It does not belong to one region, one chieftaincy, or one tongue. It belongs to the whole civilisation of the Plateau — which is exactly why a king from the far side of the country can stand up for it, and be right to.
Start with the hill, not the grave
What Malindidzimu was, long before a coffin reached its summit
Before it was a ticketed viewpoint, the Matobo range was — and remains — the spiritual centre of the Plateau. In our tradition these hills are Mabweadziva, the home of Mwari: not a “god” to be translated into a European mould, but the creating force — Musiki, Musikavanhu, Nyadenga — and a covenant that orders the living, the land and the vadzimu, the ancestral spirits who dwell in the air around us.
Here stands Njelele, at Matonjeni — the oracle of Mwari, tended across the centuries by the custodians of the Soko Mbire priestly lineage, the “Rainmakers of Matonjeni,” those who “live in the rocks.” To this oracle people have come for generations for rain, for fertility, for guidance — long before a single European set foot on the Plateau. This is not folklore and it is not the past tense. It is a living shrine, visited today. When we speak of Malindidzimu as sacred, we are not reaching for poetry. We are stating the plain spiritual geography of a nation.
This was never an empty hill waiting to be given meaning by a foreigner’s will. It was already holy ground, with its own name, its own spirits, and its own keepers — centuries before 1902.
The intrusion, and the indignity that followed
A grave on a shrine — then a turnstile at its foot
On 10 April 1902, three weeks after his death, Cecil Rhodes was carried up Malindidzimu and buried at its summit, exactly as his will directed. The man whose company had conquered the territory chose, as his final act of possession, to lay his body upon the holiest hill of the people he had dispossessed. A short walk away, the Shangani Memorial was later raised to the Allan Wilson patrol — a second colonial monument planted on the same sacred ground.
What came next turned trespass into routine. The shrine was fenced, catalogued as a monument, and opened to paying visitors. By 2018 more than 32,000 people a year were buying tickets to look at a coloniser’s tomb on a sacred Plateau summit — the deepest holy place of a living religion reduced to a line on a safari itinerary. As one heritage leader put it plainly, “Rhodes wanted to defile that place… now our children go there to look at a white man’s grave.”
This is not a fringe demand
The Mambos join a chorus that reaches the head of state
It would be easy for outsiders to file the Mambos’ notice under “activism.” It is nothing of the kind. The call to return Rhodes from Malindidzimu has been made for over forty years, and it is voiced today by the custodians of the shrine itself, by the national heritage bodies, and — in December 2021 — by the President of Zimbabwe, who publicly called for Rhodes to be exhumed. The custodian of culture at the Njelele shrine wants him gone. The Zimbabwe Heritage Trust wants him gone.
What the Mambos of Manicaland add is the one authority that matters most in a question of sacred ground: the voice of traditional leadership, speaking for the Plateau’s own spiritual order rather than through the language of politics or petitions. When the keepers of the covenant speak on behalf of a shrine, it is not a campaign. It is custodianship doing its proper work.
Say exactly what is being asked
The ask is narrow, and it is fair
What is being asked
- That Rhodes’s remains be moved off Malindidzimu, so the shrine is a shrine again.
- That he be reburied elsewhere in Zimbabwe — a dignified resting place, simply not on sacred ground.
- That the Rhodes family lead the reburial, following the Plateau’s own rites for the dead.
- That the sanctity of a living religion’s holiest site be restored to its people.
What is not being asked
- Not expulsion from Zimbabwe, nor shipping his bones to England.
- Not vengeance, desecration, or dishonour to the dead.
- Not the erasing of history — the colonial story can still be told and taught.
- Not a political stunt — a matter of the spirit, settled in the way of the ancestors.
The dignified path
Let the family lead — it is the honourable way, and the surest
Here is the part this Journal has long urged, and urges again. On the Plateau, the dead are the responsibility of their own people. A family tends its own graves, performs its own rites, and brings its own home. The most respectful resolution to Malindidzimu is therefore not a government order or a crowd’s petition, but the Rhodes family stepping forward to lead the reburial of their kin — of their own accord, with dignity, in cooperation with the shrine’s custodians.
Rhodes’s descendants acknowledge the wrong of a grave on a sacred shrine and offer, willingly, to move their ancestor — the honourable act of a family claiming responsibility for its own.
The keepers of Njelele and the traditional leadership guide the process, so the removal itself honours the shrine and the ancestral spirits rather than troubling them — answering the very caution that some elders rightly raise.
Rhodes is reinterred with respect at a fitting site that is not sacred ground. He keeps a grave; the Plateau keeps its shrine. No bones are dishonoured, and no history is erased.
The summit is restored to what it has always been — a place of Mwari, not a photo stop — and its true, far older story becomes the thing visitors come to learn.
Inaction is the real danger. A grave left in dispute on contested sacred ground is the grave most exposed to indignity over time. The family that acts now, with grace, protects its ancestor far better than the family that waits for the matter to be taken out of its hands.
The honest ledger
Answering the three objections, fairly
“But the grave brings tourism.” It does, and some families near the site have depended on it — that is real and not to be waved away. But a shrine’s sanctity is not a commodity to be rented out, and the deeper truth is that Malindidzimu’s own story is the greater draw: the oracle of Mwari, the rainmakers of Matonjeni, a religious landscape centuries older than any coloniser. Tell that story well and the hill loses nothing; it gains its dignity and its depth.
“The grave helps us remember colonialism.” So let us remember it — fully, and on our terms. The history does not live in the bones; it lives in the record, the museum, the teaching. The colonial chapter can be told in full without a conqueror’s tomb pinned to the holiest hill of the conquered. Move the man; keep the memory.
“Exhumation might disturb the ancestors.” This caution deserves respect, not dismissal — and it is precisely why the family-led, custodian-guided path matters. Done properly, through the shrine’s own keepers and the proper rites, a reburial does not offend the spirits; it settles an old offence against them. What troubles sacred ground is not a careful, consecrated removal. It is a coffin that was never supposed to be there in the first place.
Tete’s Take
I have argued for this for years, and I argue for it now with the same conviction and the same calm. Malindidzimu is not a battlefield and this is not revenge. It is a question of returning a holy place to the people whose holy place it has always been — and of giving Cecil Rhodes, too, the one thing a conqueror’s grand gesture denied him: an ordinary, dignified grave, tended by his own family, in peace, where it belongs.
There is a generosity in the Mambos’ position that the colonial record never extended to us. We are not asking to do to Rhodes’s remains what was done to our shrines. We are asking his family to do for him exactly what our tradition would have us do for any ancestor — to claim him, to move him home from a place he should never have lain, and to lay him to rest with respect. That is not the language of grievance. It is the language of a civilisation that knows how to honour the dead, even the dead who wronged it.
So let the Rhodes family hear the Mambos not as an accusation but as an invitation — to lead, to act, to make this right in the dignified way of the Plateau. Give Malindidzimu back its spirits. And let a tired old argument finally end, not in bitterness, but in two graves each resting where it should.
A shrine is not an altar for a conqueror. Give Malindidzimu back its spirits.
Tovera Mudzimu Dzoka
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