1911 — 1912 · Shakutenuka
The one who would not bow
Between 1909 and 1910 the Swedish trader and labour recruiter Wilhelm Frykberg took more than four hundred Kaonde men out of Kasempa to work the Rand mines. They went without proper clothing into bitter cold. Close to a hundred of them died of pneumonia before they could come home.
On 22 May 1911 a Kaonde man named Tumiwa, a former messenger of the Boma, went with Tapoka and Kungwa to answer for those deaths. Frykberg was not at Shindamona that night. They fired through the window of the house and killed his employee, the Swedish storekeeper Niels A. Ohlund, known locally as Bwana Chiyumbi.
District Commissioner W. H. Hazell hunted the three men for the better part of a year before they were taken. On 11 November 1912 they were hanged.
Standing before his execution, Tumiwa did not deny what he had done. He confessed it publicly and without fear, and said plainly that the man he had gone for was Frykberg. For that he is remembered as Shakutenuka — the one who would not bow.
Among the Kaonde his story has never been told as a warning. It is told as courage — the measure of what the people of this chiefdom were willing to answer with when their sons were taken and did not return.
The killings brought lasting resentment toward the colonial administration and broke labour recruitment in Kasempa for years afterwards. In 2023 a historical plaque and a borehole were raised in Shakutenuka's name, given by the granddaughter of Wilhelm Frykberg. The full account, and the reconciliation →
