Shona religion runs on two classes of spirit beneath Mwari, and keeping them apart is necessary to understanding either. The vadzimu are family ancestors. They attend to their own descendants, they are approached at the homestead, and their concerns are the ordinary ones of health, children and conduct within a lineage. The mhondoro are something else: the spirits of dead chiefs, associated with the lion, whose sphere is a territory rather than a family, and whose business is the land, the rain over it, and the legitimacy of whoever rules it. A mhondoro speaks through a spirit medium, the svikiro, and a medium of an important mhondoro has historically been a figure of considerable political weight.
Mwari stands above both, and the Matonjeni cult reaches across territories in a way neither vadzimu nor mhondoro can.
That reach produced the most argued question in the field. In 1896 and 1897 the Shona and Ndebele rose against the British South Africa Company, in what is now remembered as the First Chimurenga. Terence Ranger argued in 1967 that the risings were coordinated across a wide area by the religious authorities, the Mwari cult at Matonjeni and the mhondoro mediums together supplying the organisation that a scattered population could not otherwise have achieved. The thesis was influential for a generation. It was then contested in detail, most persistently by David Beach, who argued that the evidence for central religious coordination was thin, that Ranger had read later nationalist assumptions backwards into 1896, and that the risings are better explained by local grievance and local leadership. Ranger himself later revised his position substantially. Both readings are still in circulation, and the atlas records the question as open rather than settled.