Kanyemba

Kanyemba is a village in the province of Mashonaland Central, Zimbabwe, on the south bank of the Zambezi River at the extreme northern point of the country, where the borders of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia meet. It serves the Dande communal land. The village is named after Jose Rosario De Andrade, a prazo holder known as Kanyemba, meaning the ferocious one, who built a private army of Chikunda soldiers from the 1870s and was said to command 10,000 of them in the 1880s. His descendants have kept the village chieftainship to the present day. The main peoples of the area are the Chikunda and Doma, and in 2018 the government set up a 200 hectare irrigation scheme for local communities.