Bernard Mizeki was born around the year 1861 at Inhambane, on the coast of what was then Portuguese East Africa and is today Mozambique. As a boy of about twelve he left home for Cape Town, far to the south, and spent ten hard years there as a laborer in the slums of the colonial city. It was there, at an Anglican night school run by the Cowley Fathers, that he learned to read and learned of Christ, and in 1886 he was baptized. He had a remarkable gift for languages, and the missionaries trained him as a catechist, a teacher of the faith who would stand between the European clergy and the African people and make the gospel speak in their own tongue.

In 1891 he went north with the first Anglican bishop of Mashonaland into the country that was becoming Southern Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe, and settled among the Nhowe people near the place now called Marondera. There he did the quiet, foundational work of a catechist: he built a mission on a high plateau, he learned the Shona language until he could pray and teach in it, he gathered the children to read, and he gave himself to the long labor of translation, putting much of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Chishona so that the people could hear the word of God in the words they were born to. He married a local woman, Mutwa, who had become a Christian. For five years the mission grew.

Then in 1896 the people of the land rose against the British who had taken it, in the revolt the Shona remember as the First Chimurenga. It was a rising against the colonizers, and because the Christian teachers were taken for the colonizers' men, the catechists became targets. Mizeki was warned that his life was in danger and urged to flee to safety. He would not go. He had been placed among these people and had made himself responsible for them, and he would not leave them to save himself. On the night of the eighteenth of June, 1896, he was called out of his hut and struck down with spears on the hillside below his mission.

What happened next the church has remembered ever since, though no document proves it. His wife and a companion, going up the hill to where he had fallen, told of a great light over the place and a sound like the rushing of many wings, and that when they came to the spot his body was gone, and they never found it to bury. So the church that lost his grave kept the man. On the hill where he died a shrine was raised, and every June, for more than a hundred years now, pilgrims have climbed it from across southern Africa to give thanks for the catechist who would not run, the African who gave his own people Christ in their own language and then gave his life rather than leave them. He has no tomb to visit. He did not need one. The church trusts that the God he served will raise him on the last day, whole, with the people he loved gathered around him.