MBUYA NEHANDA and Sekuru Kaguvi were not engineers. They were not computer scientists. They were not policymakers. And yet, they were the most visionary innovators of their time, for they understood the original principle of sustainable development: that to defend the land is to imagine futures from within it. That to say “my bones will rise” is to commit to a continuity of imagination. It is to declare that even death cannot be the end of African agency if the living remember where they stand. It is not enough to create apps, machines or processes.

Each innovation must answer: for whom? By whom? From where? With what resources? To what end? And above all: What context does it serve? Nehanda’s struggle answered these questions.

If it does not speak to the African condition, then it is merely a mirage, a technological sedative to numb the pain of post-colonial dependency. The execution of Mbuya Nehanda and Sekuru Kaguvi on 27 April, 1898 was not just the tragic end of two revolutionary figures, it was the brutal silencing of African imagination at its highest.

It was the deliberate attempt to extinguish a flame of resistance lit from the deepest chambers of cultural agency, rooted in a consciousness that was fully aware of where it stood in relation to the universe. That execution marked not merely the death of bodies, but the attempted execution of a worldview: an African worldview that had imagined, from within itself, a future free from foreign domination. And if we are to honestly interrogate our current place in the long arc of African development, we must summon those spirits not as relics of a past long gone, but as guiding spirits of a future that still waits to be imagined with clarity, purpose and sovereignty. It must be stated now, clearly and without apology: agency is not an academic idea. It is spiritual. It is intellectual. It is emotional.

And, most of all, it is contextual. What Nehanda and Kaguvi embodied was not rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but a context-driven resistance to foreign definitions of civilisation. They understood — intuitively, spiritually — that freedom is not inherited. It is imagined, and re-imagined, then earned and re-earned in every generation.

As innovation hubs begin to sprout across Zimbabwe, they must be rooted in the ancestral wisdom and cultural context that defines us. Without this grounding, they risk becoming nothing more than sleek glass structures, adorned with borrowed technologies and foreign ideas, handed down like sacred relics from distant Silicon Valleys we are told to admire, not interrogate. Innovation that lacks self-determination is not progress, it is performance.

It is innovation as ornament, not as transformation. We must remain vigilant: the same blade that once silenced Nehanda now slices through our educational systems, stripping research of its African soul. The same noose that hung Kaguvi tightens once more — not around the body, but around the spirit of today’s youth, when their dreams are shaped solely by degrees that pull them away from the land of their ancestors, the wealth beneath it, and the stories that live above it. Why do we celebrate Nehanda on posters and currency, but ignore her spirit in our research and development? This write-up is a ritual. It is an invocation.

It is a challenge to those manning our nation in the public and private sector to kneel before their own context before they rise with innovation in their hands. For we must remember: all innovation is imagined and imagination is always guided by motive. That motive must come from within the coordinates of our existence, or else it will simply replicate the motives of those who once executed our prophets. We must ask: In a land where Mbuya Nehanda was murdered for daring to imagine a Zimbabwe ruled by Zimbabweans, how do we now imagine development funded and controlled by the descendants of her killers? How do we applaud innovation when the raw materials are African but the blueprints are not? The answer lies in the reconciliation of imagination and context.

Let each research paper begin with the spirit of inquiry but conclude with the spirit of responsibility. Let each prototype be tested not only for performance, but also for cultural congruence. In this way, sustainable development becomes a sacred process, a rite of return to our own minds. Because, as Nehanda and Kaguvi proved with their lives, the mind is the first and last weapon of liberation.

Let us then imagine from where we stand: in the hills of Mashonaland where Nehanda spoke her last words; in the prisons where Kaguvi waited for death but never for defeat. Let us stand in our schools, our labs, our fields, our streets, and imagine — not how to catch up to the West, but how to define progress for ourselves. For the truth is this: when we imagine from where we stand, we do not need permission. We do not need validation. We do not need AID. We need only the courage to look back in order to look forward.

We need only the will to remember that the same land which birthed Nehanda and Kaguvi is still beneath our feet, unchanged, except for the fact that it now cries not from the sound of colonial gunfire, but from the silence of an unimagined future. And so, to the minds in the innovation hubs, in industries: do not look abroad for your compass. Look inward. Look backward. Look downward into the soil.

Then, and only then, look forward. For sustainable development is not a goal. It is a return. A return to the Spirit that guides. A return to the mind that dreams. A return to the self that knows. A return to context. And it begins — not with funding. Not with policies. Not with partnerships. But with agency. We must ask: What consciousness animated Mbuya Nehanda to say, “Mapfupa angu achamuka (My bones shall rise)? What did she see that we now struggle to remember? And what does it say about us that we have not yet fully stood up on those bones? Because if we are not succeeding and thriving it means mapfupa acho haana kumuka zvachose. Not fully. Not as long as we define progress through the eyes of those who hanged her.

Not as long as we measure development by how well we mimic those who found glory in our humiliation. Not as long as we forget that her execution was a message, loud and clear, to erase our sense of agency. To kill the context that justified our resistance. To erase the coordinates from which we imagined our dignity. And yet, she resisted.

Sekuru Kaguvi resisted. Not because they had weapons that could match those of the invaders. But because they had motives that matched the moral weight of justice. They stood because they knew they were standing on something. Land. Spirit. History. Identity. Agency. Context. Things we have since been taught to ignore.