The defense found themselves caught between Hwata's version and Charwe's version in. Hwata had clearly killed Pollard, but the question remained: Did Nehanda order the killing or not?
None of this so far, in and of itself, is evidence of her guilt or innocence. So what is the proof that Beach gives for his argument?
First of all, there are no early reports that place Charwe near the fighting that began the rising. Her name appears to have been mixed up with the fighting later on in a couple of unsubstantiated rumors. The first was in September 1896, when the Shona claimed they would give up the person who had made them rise. The British Army claimed in their report that they thought this must be "Mahanda the great witch." A couple of days later, the British captured a woman near the area of Amandas, who claimed that Nehanda had sent guns to the Shona near Amandas. She further claimed that Nehanda had received a "relic of the god," a man's arm. When the British Army found a cave with loot captured from whites a couple days later, they assumed that it belonged to Nehanda.
At that point, the British began to track Charwe's whereabouts, along with that of the Kaguvi medium, whose role in the war has been well-established. On 27 October, 1897, the Kaguvi medium surrendered.
Here is where the evidence that Charwe may have been innocent becomes a little more clear. In a statement to the British, the Kaguvi medium said, "If the government want me to pay for these things I will pay with a young girl. I want [Nehanda], Goronga and Wamponga brought in they started the rebellion."
In order to understand this argument, it is important to understand the precarious position of Shona women in precolonial society. As key sources of wealth, labor, and reproduction, they were often "sold" by their fathers as payment for debts, kidnapped to be held as ransom or to become slave wives, and made vulnerable to abuse by husbands, mother-in-laws, and wives who had been married to their husbands longer than they. Women were a form of payment for debt; they could also satisfy a grieved party in the event of death or accident (e.g., a man offering his daughter as a wife to the brother of the man he injured or killed).
