Shona

Mwari is the creator and is approached through intermediaries rather than directly, and the layering of those intermediaries is the structure of Shona religion.

Nearest to the living are the vadzimu, the ancestral spirits of the family, concerned with the conduct and wellbeing of their descendants and addressed within the household and the lineage. Above them are the mhondoro, the lion spirits, which are the spirits of former chiefs and rulers and whose concern is territorial rather than familial: rain, land, fertility and the legitimacy of authority over a defined area.

That territorial dimension gives the tradition a political weight that household ancestor veneration alone would not carry, and it has had real historical consequence, since mhondoro mediums have spoken to questions of land and rule at moments when those questions were being decided by force.

The medium, the svikiro, is the person through whom a spirit speaks. The office is not chosen; it is recognised, tested by those qualified to test it, and held under conditions.

At the highest level, the Matonjeni shrines in the Matobo hills are associated with Mwari and are attended by their own custodians, and their authority extends well beyond any single lineage.

Shona traditional religion is living and is listed by this atlas as restricted. The shrines are under the authority of the people who keep them.

The written record about Shona religion was produced by missionaries, settlers and a colonial administration, and it was produced in a territory whose land was being taken.

That context is not background. The mhondoro mediums were directly involved in the risings of the 1890s against colonial occupation, and again in the liberation war of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of the colonial documentation about them was gathered as intelligence about an opposition. It is detailed, and it is the record of an adversary.

Missionary accounts supply another layer, produced by people intending to replace what they described, and a persistent feature of that literature is the argument over whether Mwari could be identified with the Christian God, which shaped how the tradition was reported in ways that are still being unpicked.

The most valuable modern scholarship has come from historians and anthropologists working from the 1960s onward, including Zimbabwean scholars, and it has generally been careful to trace how the tradition itself changed under a century of pressure rather than presenting a timeless system.

The tradition transmits through mediums, through the training of those who serve at shrines, and within families. It is not a body of doctrine.

The atlas describes the order of the tradition and reproduces nothing held by the shrine keepers or the mediums.