The Bira, the Mbira, and a Medium in Wartime

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.