There is a dangerous silence creeping into our classrooms. Across many education systems, history is increasingly treated as optional, a subject pushed aside in favour of maths, science and technology.
In doing so, don’t we risk producing generations who can code machines but do not understand the struggles, sacrifices and courage that shaped the societies they live in?
History is not just about memorising dates, deaths or distant wars. It is about identity. It is about moral memory. It is about understanding how people, often under extraordinary oppression, found the courage to resist injustice.
Few stories illustrate this more powerfully than that of Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, a woman whose courage continues to echo across Africa’s liberation history.
Born around 1862 in what is now Zimbabwe, Nehanda was a revered svikiro, spirit medium, of the Zezuru Shona people.
During the late 19th century, when the British South Africa Company began imposing colonial rule across the region, seizing land and dismantling indigenous systems of governance, Nehanda emerged as a powerful voice of resistance.
Her influence was not rooted in political office or military command. It came from something deeper: spiritual authority and moral conviction. She mobilised communities to resist colonial domination during the First Chimurenga uprising.
Colonial authorities eventually crushed the rebellion. Nehanda was captured and accused of involvement in the killing of a colonial official.
In 1898, she was tried by the colonial court in Salisbury [now Harare] and sentenced to death.
At the age of about 60, Nehanda walked to the gallows with extraordinary dignity. Missionaries reportedly urged her to renounce her beliefs before her execution. She refused.
Before she was hanged on April 27, 1898, she is said to have declared words that would become prophetic for generations of liberation fighters: “Mapfupa angu achamuka [My bones shall rise again].”
Decades later, as Zimbabwe’s independence movement gathered momentum, her words became a rallying cry, a symbol of spiritual resistance and national awakening.
But the story of Nehanda is about more than Zimbabwe. It speaks to a broader truth that history books too often overlook: women have always been architects of social transformation. From spiritual leaders to organisers of resistance movements, women have stood at the moral centre of struggles for justice. Yet their stories are frequently marginalised, simplified or omitted altogether.
When we fail to teach these histories in our schools, we do more than neglect the past. We deny young people the opportunity to see courage in all its forms.
Students deserve to know that resistance is not always loud. Sometimes it is carried in the quiet resolve of a woman who refuses to bow before an empire.
Teaching history also serves another vital purpose: it protects societies from repeating their worst mistakes. Colonialism, racism, exploitation and oppression did not disappear with time. They were challenged and dismantled through sacrifice and struggle.
Without historical understanding, freedom begins to look inevitable rather than hard-won. And when freedom is taken for granted, it becomes dangerously fragile.
Our classrooms should therefore not only teach the names of presidents and generals. They should teach the names of women like Nehanda — women who held communities together when institutions collapsed, who inspired courage when fear threatened to silence a people.
History is not a luxury subject. It is civic education. It is ethical training. It is the foundation of democratic consciousness. A society that forgets its history risks losing its soul.
When young people no longer know the stories of those who resisted injustice before them, they might struggle to recognise injustice when it appears again.
The lesson from Nehanda’s life is clear: courage can emerge from unexpected places and the voices that shape history are not always those who sit in palaces or parliaments.
Sometimes they are our grandmothers. Sometimes they are healers. Sometimes they are women standing quietly at the centre of a people’s struggle, reminding a nation that dignity is worth defending.
Imagine what Africa would look like today if every woman who organised resistance, preserved culture, sheltered freedom fighters
or inspired communities had been written into the national narrative with the same weight and recognition as men.
What if the archives had listened more carefully to the voices of grandmothers, spirit mediums, organisers and mothers of revolutions? What if every heroine who shaped the moral backbone of a nation had been recorded truthfully, factually and unapologetically?
Perhaps the Africa we imagine would be a continent that understands its own strength more clearly, recognising that its foundations were not built by a few celebrated figures but by generations of courageous women and men whose names history must remember — a history where every heroine is visible, where truth is restored and where the full story of a nation is finally told.
If we want future generations to understand the price of freedom, we must ensure that these stories are not forgotten. For when a nation forgets its heroines, it begins to forget itself.
Cathay Yenana is a South African media professional, strategist, social activist and board member of the June 16 1976 Foundation.© Higher Education Media Services. This was published on the site Mail & Guardian