Her Skull Is Still Missing: 128 Years After Britain Hanged Mbuya Nehanda, Zimbabwe's Families Are Still Waiting

On International Women's Day 2026, descendants of Zimbabwe's First Chimurenga heroes have formally demanded that London's Natural History Museum and Cambridge University help them find the skulls of their ancestors - taken as colonial war trophies in the 1890s and possibly still sitting on British shelves today.

Photo: Unsplash / The weight of colonial history does not lighten with time.

In Harare, there is a bronze statue of Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana - more widely known as Mbuya Nehanda - erected in the heart of the city in 2021. She stands upright, fist raised, mouth open mid-sentence. The statue is beautiful. But the remains of the real Nehanda, the woman who inspired generations of Zimbabwean resistance fighters before she was hanged by British colonial authorities in 1898, are believed to be somewhere inside a British institution that says it cannot find her.

Today is International Women's Day. And Mbuya Nehanda is still not home.

This week, eight descendants of Zimbabwe's First Chimurenga heroes - the leaders of an armed uprising against British colonisers in the 1890s - formally wrote to the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Cambridge demanding action. Not asking. Demanding. After years of diplomatic requests, heritage discussions, formal votes, and institutional silence, the families are saying enough. They are offering DNA samples. They are proposing expert taskforces. They are naming names of their ancestors and asking: where are they? (The Guardian, March 7, 2026)

The answer they keep getting is a version of: "We're not sure they're here." For the families, that is not an answer. It is an evasion. And the weight of 128 years of evasion has a specific gravity.

The First Chimurenga: Who Was Fighting and Why

The word "chimurenga" comes from a Shona name for the spirit of resistance - and the First Chimurenga of 1896-97 was as total as resistance gets. The British South Africa Company, Cecil Rhodes' private colonial army in everything but name, had seized land across what is now Zimbabwe for farming and mining, displacing indigenous Shona and Ndebele communities with a brutality that treated their sovereignty as a bureaucratic obstacle to be processed and filed away.

The uprising was multi-fronted and fierce. Chiefs across the territory rose against the settlers. Spirit mediums - revered figures in Shona tradition who served as channels between the living and the ancestors - became central to organising resistance. Among the most important were Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, who held the spirit of Nehanda Charwe, and Sekuru Kaguvi, a spirit medium from the Svosve area. These were not fringe figures. In Shona cosmology, spirit mediums like Nehanda were the living connection between communities and their vadzimu - their ancestral spirits - and through them, to Mwari, or God.

The British crushed the uprising over two years of brutal counterinsurgency. In 1898, Nehanda and Kaguvi were captured, put on trial in a colonial court whose authority they refused to recognise, and hanged. The British did not simply execute them. They beheaded resistance leaders and sent the skulls to England - an act Mugabe later called "among the highest forms of racist moral decadence, sadism and human insensitivity" - as trophies of conquest, physical proof that the subjugation of a people was complete.

Chief Chingaira Makoni met a similar fate. He fought British forces at the battles of Gwindingwi in 1896, was captured, executed by firing squad, and beheaded. His skull is believed to be among those taken to England. The current Chief Makoni, Cogen Simbayi Gwasira, is one of the eight signatories to this week's letters demanding action.

"We are very aggrieved as the descendants of those ancestors for the dehumanisation that took place during that period. We feel that the British, and especially the museums in England, should be honest and return those things that they took."

- Cogen Simbayi Gwasira, current Chief Makoni, descendant of Chief Chingaira Makoni (The Guardian, March 2026)

Photo: Unsplash / Britain's museums hold thousands of human remains from Africa. The institutions call them "collections." The families call them ancestors.

What Britain Is Holding - and How Much of It

The scale of British institutional holding of African human remains is staggering. A Guardian Freedom of Information investigation published alongside this week's news revealed that UK universities, museums, and councils hold at least 11,856 items of human remains from Africa. That number is likely an undercount - many items have incomplete provenance records, a convenient artifact of the same imperial system that stole them.

The University of Cambridge holds the largest collection, with at least 6,223 items of African human remains. The Natural History Museum comes second with at least 3,375. These are not anonymous collections. Many of these remains have documented histories. Some were taken as trophies. Some were collected for the pseudoscience of racial phrenology - the Victorian belief that skull shape could prove white intellectual superiority - a science that has been thoroughly debunked but whose material legacy sits, quietly, in British climate-controlled storage.

The families of the First Chimurenga heroes believe at least six of their ancestors' skulls are among these collections. They believe they have grounds to suspect the Natural History Museum and Cambridge specifically. The institutions disagree - or more precisely, they say they cannot confirm it.

Dr. Rudo Sithole, former executive director of the International Council of African Museums and former director of the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe, has been blunt about what she believes is happening. She says Zimbabwean experts do not believe the British institutions have conducted adequate research to genuinely determine whether their holdings include the chimurenga heroes' skulls.

"Because people long believed that all the chimurenga heroes' remains were in the UK, we are now very worried that not even a single one has been acknowledged to be there."

- Dr. Rudo Sithole, former executive director, International Council of African Museums (The Guardian, March 2026)

The frustration in that sentence is precise. The absence of confirmation is being used as the absence of evidence - a logical sleight of hand that allows institutions to hold onto contested collections indefinitely while appearing cooperative.

The Spiritual Dimension: A Cut-Off from God

For people outside Shona tradition, "repatriation of human remains" sounds like a question of cultural sentiment, perhaps historical symbolism. It is not. It is a question of active spiritual harm that continues every day the skulls are absent.

In Shona cosmology, vadzimu - ancestral spirits - are the living conduit between families and communities, and Mwari, the supreme God. Spirit mediums like Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi held especially powerful vadzimu. When ancestors are properly buried, their spirits are released to fulfil this role. When they are not - when their remains are desecrated, scattered, held in foreign institutions - the spiritual connection is severed.

"Some of our very important ancestors who held the traditional responsibility for taking our grievances to the Lord were killed, murdered, their heads were taken. We are suffering because until those ancestors return to us, then we have no access to the Lord."

- Cogen Simbayi Gwasira, current Chief Makoni (The Guardian, March 2026)

This is not metaphor. For Chief Makoni, his community has been functionally cut off from a channel of prayer for 128 years because Britain took his ancestor's skull as a war trophy. He frames the unresolved situation as an ongoing colonial injury - not a historical one. The dehumanisation did not end when the British left Zimbabwe in 1980. It continues every day those remains are not accounted for.

The letters sent this week directly address this: "This is not only about the past. It is about whether institutions today are willing to confront colonial violence honestly and repair its enduring harms. Until the remains of our ancestors are accounted for and returned, the suffering continues."

Three Years of Broken Promises: The 2022 Vote That Changed Nothing

In November 2022, the Natural History Museum's board of trustees made a formal decision to repatriate all Zimbabwean human remains in its collections. That vote was widely reported as a breakthrough. It was celebrated. It represented a shift from the museum's previous position of cautious deflection.

That was three years ago. Families are still waiting.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations wrote to UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy last week in support of the descendants, explicitly noting that "no discernible progress has been made in the three years since that decision." A formal institutional vote to act produced no action. The families need to know why.

The Natural History Museum's current position is that it is "committed to repatriating the 11 individuals from Zimbabwe in its collections" and is "awaiting confirmation from the Zimbabwean government as to their desired next steps." That framing puts the delay back on Zimbabwe - a move the families and independent experts reject. Dr. Sithole has said the UK lags behind France and Germany, both of which have funded research into the provenance of human remains from their former African colonies.

The University of Cambridge's position is similarly evasive in its language. A spokesperson said the vice-chancellor had "written to the families and descendants to acknowledge their profound grief" and assured them the Duckworth Collection - Cambridge's largest holding of human remains - "did not hold those of any of the first chimurenga heroes." A letter of sympathy and a denial. The families believe neither is sufficient.

The Eight Who Are Fighting Now

Behind every policy dispute is a person who drives it, and behind this week's escalation are eight people who decided that letters and protocols were no longer adequate. The eight descendants who formally signed the letters to the Natural History Museum and Cambridge represent families who have been living inside this unresolved grief for more than a century.

Chief Makoni - Cogen Simbayi Gwasira - is the most publicly vocal. He carries the specific weight of knowing his great ancestor was captured, executed by firing squad, beheaded, and had his skull sent to England. That is the family history he inherits. He says the notion of subjugation "remains in our minds" as long as those remains are unaccounted for.

The descendants have offered to provide DNA samples to assist with identification. They are not obstructing research. They are offering to participate in it. They are asking that a taskforce of Zimbabwean and British experts be established to examine the contested remains and archives together - a collaborative, scientific, accountable process. The institutions have not agreed to this as of this writing.

Dr. Sithole has provided expert cover for the descendants' position, arguing forcefully that the institutions' research has been inadequate by any reasonable standard. She represents a growing body of African museum professionals who are tired of waiting for former colonial powers to do the right thing on their own timeline.

"If those remains are not part of us, the notion of subjugation remains in our minds. Because we feel if we are united with our ancestors, then that chapter of colonialism is closed."

- Chief Makoni, Cogen Simbayi Gwasira (The Guardian, March 2026)

This is remarkable clarity about what return would mean. Not just justice. Not just symbolism. Closure. The ability to close a chapter that has been held open by British institutional inertia for 128 years.

Photo: Unsplash / Colonial archives hold the paper trails that could identify remains. The question is whether institutions will follow them honestly.

Mbuya Nehanda on International Women's Day

Today, on March 8th, the world observes International Women's Day under various themes of progress, equity, and women's power. Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana belongs in every conversation about women who changed history - and about the specific ways women's contributions are erased, appropriated, or physically seized.

Nehanda was not a symbolic figure in her own time. She was a strategist and a spiritual authority who coordinated resistance across communities. She was charismatic enough that the British specifically sought her out, arrested her, and ensured she was publicly executed. Her final words, reportedly, were a prophecy: "My bones will rise again." Those words became the rallying cry for Zimbabwe's independence movement in the 1960s and 70s. When Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF fighters went into the bush, they did so in her name. When Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, she was invoked. When the statue was erected in Harare in 2021, her fist was raised.

But the actual remains of the woman behind the prophecy - the skull of a person who refused to beg her executioners for mercy, who refused baptism before the hanging, who embodied resistance until the last breath - are believed to be sitting in an English institution that says it cannot confirm she is there.

The irony is not subtle. Britain turned Nehanda into a war trophy in 1898 to prove her subjugation. In 2026, she remains, possibly, in British hands - and institutions are still debating the provenance paperwork. The "bones rise again" prophecy has been partially fulfilled. Zimbabwe built a nation around her memory. But the bones themselves have not risen. Not yet.

The Broader Reckoning: Who Owns the Colonial Past?

The Zimbabwe skulls case does not exist in isolation. It is one thread in a much larger, accelerating global reckoning with what European institutions collected during the colonial period and what obligations they now hold.

The Benin Bronzes - looted from the Kingdom of Benin by British forces in 1897, the same era as the First Chimurenga - have been the most prominent flashpoint. Some UK institutions have agreed to return pieces. Others have resisted. The debate has exposed a fundamental tension: British museums often cite legislation that prohibits them from permanently deaccessioning items in their collections, legislation that was passed without input from the communities whose property was placed in those collections by force.

The human remains cases go deeper than artifacts. When we talk about bronzes, we talk about cultural property. When we talk about skulls taken as war trophies from people who were killed specifically because they resisted colonial occupation, we are talking about something else entirely. We are talking about the physical bodies of specific named people whose families still exist, who still grieve, who still pray, who still wait.

France and Germany have moved more deliberately than Britain in recent years. France has passed legislation enabling returns. Germany funded the research into its Namibian skull collections. Britain has institutional votes without action, sympathetic letters without deliverables, and a legal framework that treats colonial plunder as protected heritage.

The all-party parliamentary group's letter to Lisa Nandy signals that this is becoming a live political issue at Westminster level. Whether the current government acts depends on whether the political cost of inaction exceeds the institutional inertia of doing something. That calculus usually changes when families like these refuse to accept "we cannot confirm" as an answer.

What Happens Next: The Window, the Wall, and the Long Game

The letters sent this month represent a formal escalation. After decades of diplomatic requests, heritage dialogues, and institutional votes that produced no movement, the descendants have now created a paper trail that names what they want, from whom, and why. That matters legally and politically.

The APPG's letter to culture secretary Lisa Nandy adds parliamentary weight. The Zimbabwean government has been involved in this issue for a decade, since Mugabe's 2015 Heroes Day demand. The question is whether this escalation breaks through where previous efforts have not.

There are several possible outcomes. The most optimistic: the institutions agree to the joint taskforce, genuine archival research is conducted, remains are identified, and repatriation happens within a defined timeline. This is what Germany did with Namibia, imperfectly but meaningfully.

The most likely without external pressure: continued institutional processing, more correspondence, more expressions of commitment, no timeline, no resolution. The families know this is the default path. It is why they are escalating.

The wildcard is political. If this story gains enough traction - if the image of Britain holding possible skull trophies of a woman celebrated on International Women's Day as an icon of resistance creates sufficient public pressure - institutions may find the cost of delay suddenly exceeds the cost of action. Colonial reckoning has a way of moving in surges, not straight lines.

Mbuya Nehanda said her bones would rise again. Zimbabwe built a country on that promise. On International Women's Day 2026, her descendants are still doing the rising for her - from Harare to London, in formal letters and public statements, with DNA samples ready and their patience finally exhausted.

The skulls should come home. Every year they don't is a choice Britain makes again.

Timeline: 128 Years of Waiting