Online Reporter
Charles Mavhunga
Tourism Branding
Matopos is not scenery. Long before any wall was built or any name was carved into granite, the balancing rocks and wooded valleys of this landscape were a place of communion: a home for Mwari, the Shona High God, whose voice is still consulted at the shrine of Njelele and a resting ground for Ndebele royalty, where King Mzilikazi and his successors sleep among the hills their people called sacred.
This is a land of rainmaking rites, ancestral consultation and royal burial: a cosmology, not a curiosity.
Yet for over a century, the dominant monument on this sacred ground has told a different story.
The Shrine of the Memorable Order of Tin Hats (MOTH) and the nearby grave of Cecil John Rhodes present Matopos primarily as a site of colonial conquest and settler memory.
Visitors arrive at one of Africa’s most spiritually significant landscapes and leave having learned more about the men who took the land than the people who have always belonged to it.
It is time to reverse that order. Zimbabwe’s tourism story at Matopos must place its own heroes first: not erase colonial history, but no longer let it lead.
A Monument that Forgets Who the Land Belongs To
The MOTH Shrine and Rhodes’s grave are not neutral historical markers. They are curated narratives, built to memorialise settler figures as founders and heroes, on a site their arrival actually disrupted.
For a visitor with no prior context, the messaging is unambiguous: this hill belongs to the story of colonial Rhodesia.
This framing does real harm. It positions Ndebele kings, Shona spiritual authorities and the guerrilla fighters who later fought and died in these same hills during the liberation war as footnotes, or leaves them out of the tour altogether.
A sacred cosmological site becomes, in the way it is marketed and guided, a shrine to the very system that violated it.
Restoring the First Custodians: Kings and Spirit Mediums
Any honest tourism narrative of Matopos begins before 1893. It begins with the Ndebele monarchy: Mzilikazi and Lobengula, whose burial sites in these hills are acts of political and spiritual continuity, not colonial-era curiosities.
It continues with Njelele and the Mwari cult, where spirit mediums have long served as custodians of rainmaking, justice and communal memory for Shona communities.
Guides, signage, and marketing materials should introduce visitors to these figures and practices first, framing Matopos correctly: as an indigenous sacred landscape that predates and outlasts colonial intrusion.
Reclaiming the War in the Hills: Liberation Fighters of Matobo
Matopos was also a battleground of the Second Chimurenga/Umvukela: the liberation war that ended settler rule. Guerrilla fighters used these same caves and kopje as shelter and strategic ground against the regime; the MOTH Shrine and Rhodes’s grave now memorialise them as heroic.
Their sacrifice is largely invisible in current tourism materials. A rebranded Matopos must include memorial trails, oral testimony, and interpretive centres dedicated to these liberation fighters: men and women whose resistance is written into the same rock formations colonial memory has claimed for itself.
Zimbabwe’s Global Service: The Peacekeeping Legacy
Zimbabwean heroism did not end with independence. Zimbabwean soldiers have served with distinction in United Nations peacekeeping missions across the continent, carrying forward a tradition of service and sacrifice beyond national borders.
Including this legacy in the Matopos narrative extends the story of Zimbabwean heroism into the present: proof that the spirit which resisted colonial rule continues to serve, protect, and build peace today.
Visiting the MOTH Shrine Without Being Defined by It:
The MOTH Shrine and Rhodes’s grave should remain accessible to visitors, but the sequence and framing must change. A rebranded tour must take visitors first through the cosmology of Njelele and the graves of Ndebele royalty, then through the liberation war trails, before finally arriving at the colonial shrine: presented candidly as one chapter of conquest within a much older and larger indigenous story, not its centrepiece.
Visitors should leave the site remembering Zimbabwean sacrifice first, and colonial history as a smaller, contextualised second.
Conclusion: A Landscape That Tells the Truth
Tourism branding is never neutral: it decides whose memory is centred and whose is erased.
For too long, Matopos has been marketed in a way that lets colonial memory dominate a landscape that indigenous Zimbabweans have always considered sacred. Zimbabwean Heroes First is a call to correct that imbalance: to let Ndebele kings, Shona spirit mediums, liberation fighters, and peacekeepers stand where they belong: at the centre of the story told about their own land.
Matopos does not need a new landscape. It needs a new lens. When visitors leave knowing the names of the kings buried there, the mediums who still speak for Mwari and the fighters who once moved silently through these same hills: before they ever hear of Rhodes: the rebranding will be complete.
Our Heroes. Our Land. Our Story.
Charles Mavhunga is a Zimbabwean scholar, Author, and Cultural ambassador currently pursuing a PhD in Management at Bindura University of Science Education. He is the author of Mbira Virtuosos: Stories of Zimbabwean Mbira Legends (available on Amazon) and co-author of Business Enterprising Skills (Forms 1-4), textbooks published by Gramsol Books, Harare and approved by Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. Recognised as a Global Cultural Ambassador, he is also a member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research for Africa (CODESRIA) and a weekly contributor to The Herald newspaper, where he has published over 300 articles on tourism branding. He can be reached at [email protected] or +263 772 989 816.
Bongani Ndlovu