When a Nation Forgets Its Heroines, It Forgets Itself
From Nehanda to countless unnamed women, Africa’s liberation was built on the courage our schools are failing to teach.
by Cathay Yenana
There is a dangerous silence, slowly creeping into our classrooms. Across many education systems, history is increasingly treated as optional, as a subject pushed aside in favour of mathematics, science, and technology. In doing so, don’t we risk producing generations who can code machines, but who 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 ordinary people, often under extraordinary oppression, yet 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 known as Zimbabwe, Nehanda was a revered svikiro, or 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 sixty, Nehanda walked to the gallows with extraordinary dignity. Missionaries reportedly urged her to renounce her beliefs before her execution, but 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”, meaning 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 simply 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 may 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. A history where truth is restored. A history 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, radio personality, and social activist whose work spans women’s rights, media representation, and youth advocacy.
©Higher Education Media Services.