State of Play

It’s just before midnight on Friday 3 August 2012. Something magical is about to happen at Book Café on Samora Machel Avenue in Harare. As rain pounds rhythmically onto the tin roof, the audience watches as the band members of Mbira dzeNharira, one of the original superstar traditional mbira bands of Zimbabwe, return to the stage. The band has already entertained the crowd for the first half of this mbira double-bill with a perfect showcase of traditional Zimbabwean mbira music. Nyamasvisva’s group Mawungira eNharira then took the show up a notch with its more dynamic and frantic energy. Now Mbira dzeNharira is going to join their younger rivals for a rare collaboration. This is what the audience has come to see: not the clash of the titans, but rather a merger.

I was aware of the goings-on of Harare’s traditional mbira scene and I knew that Nyamasvisva had once been part of Mbira dzeNharira before leaving to lead his own mbira ensemble, Mawungira eNharira. I had the honour of facilitating the first reunion of these two groups three months earlier but the bands had not been that keen at first. Friday night mbira had become a regular event in Harare’s CBD and there could often be two or three different mbira gigs across town competing for their share of the traditional mbira music fanbase. Times were tough and people had less disposable income so audience numbers were down from the previous few years. Both bands had been worried they would end up having to share a meagre door taking between them, but in the end the double-bill proved a worthy draw card and everyone had gone home with more cash than usual. This August night in 2012 was going to be their third such gig so I knew what to expect.

At a good traditional mbira show there is an almost trance-like energy in the music; the multiple layers of melody and harmony, created by three or four mbiras playing in unison, dance and weave with each other, sometimes merging and then breaking off on their own path in infinite hypnotic patterns.

This effect, with six or seven mbiras from both bands playing together at the Book Café, was magnified and magical. A couple of audience members felt so possessed by the spirits of their ancestors that their dancing became wild and out of control. The crowd simply gave them their space; this was normal, almost expected.

It’s no accident that there is a strong tie between traditional mbira music and Zimbabwean spirituality. Biras – the traditional ceremonies where people try to communicate with the ancestors for guidance or assistance, or to bring the rains or celebrate the seasons changing – are synonymous with mbira music, often accompanied by hoshos (gourds with seeds inside) which are shaken to create their own hypnotic off-time percussion.

Many of the mbira songs that are played today were composed so long ago that no record remains of the musicians who composed them, or of the ensembles who made them popular. But at the Book Café that night I was transported back to the peak of the Munhumutapa empire to a bira that the king had instigated in the very heart of Great Zimbabwe. Gwenyambiras (mbira masters) had travelled from across the country to be part of an ancient mbira orchestra now forgotten to time. Outside a clap of thunder rang out as if to punctuate this image with an auditory exclamation mark.

I remember the musician Ambuya Stella Chiweshe’s analogy at a mbira panel discussion. She said that we could imagine an mbira as if it were a time-travelling telephone allowing the player to connect across time to the ancestors. As manager of the Book Café I had seen probably a hundred mbira shows – but I hadn’t really thought too hard about what that meant.

The oldest mbira artefacts ever discovered come from west Africa, in what would be today’s Ghana, and have been dated to be around 3,000 years old. This ancestor to our modern-day mbira, found across much of central and southern Africa, had keys made of reed. Then almost 1,500 years ago, in the Zambezi escarpment region, an evolution (or a musical revolution) occurred: mbira started to be made with metal keys. This was the birth of the present-day mbira as we know it.

It is easy to miss the significance of this mbira evolution; nowadays metal mbira keys are often made from recycled bed springs or bicycle spokes, such is the abundance and accessibility of steel. But 1,500 years ago the keys would have been smelted directly from the rock containing iron ore. This material was valuable because it was used in the production of arrow tips, spears and tools to work the land, so for it to be made into mbira keys shows us the high regard in which the instrument was held.

When the missionaries arrived with the British South Africa Company to colonise this land, the Christian church declared the mbira an evil and satanic instrument because it enabled the player to communicate with, and channel the spirits of, the ancestors. As large numbers of the population were converted to Christianity, traditional beliefs and spirituality were abandoned as they were thought to be sinister and demonic. While attitudes have changed today (there are now musicians who even play gospel music on mbira) for generations mbira playing was actively discouraged.

During Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, however, many of the freedom fighters turned to their traditional beliefs and spirits for inspiration once more. Mbiras had been the vessels of two of the most powerful ancestral spirits, Nehanda and Kaguvi, who had famously been martyred during the first chimurenga (liberation struggle). Now, as these spirits’ memories were rekindled to inspire the people fighting for freedom, the popularity of mbira music grew once more.

But by this time the world had changed: new technologies and acoustic instruments had largely given way to electric ones. Now the humble mbira, amplified only by a deze (a gourd’s resonating chamber), could no longer compete with drum kits and electric guitars. Using a vocal microphone to amplify the traditional mbira’s sound often resulted in a lot of painful screeching audio feedback. Searching for ways to incorporate the mbira sound into contemporary music, musicians such as Thomas “Mukanya” Mapfumo took the songs and melodies from mbira music and adapted them to be played on the guitar thereby inventing a new genre: chimurenga music as we know it today.

In the newly independent Zimbabwe of the Eighties, reggae, rhumba, chimurenga and its cousin-brother jit were now the order of the day; and within Zimbabwe’s borders all of these genres were, and continue to be, influenced by mbira music. However the colonial hangover notion of mbira music as being primitive and backward remained. So it was that for much of the Eighties and Nineties traditional mbira music existed, but no venues were willing to promote it. Mbiras were largely still limited to being played at traditional ceremonies or as novelty tourist attractions in the plush garden restaurants of upmarket Harare hotels.

In the Nineties the Book Café appeared on Harare’s arts and culture landscape and, as one of the many innovative impacts that it had on the nightlife of the city, it became the first venue to promote mbira music and mbira bands as primetime Friday night entertainment.

By now mbiras had started to be electrified using re-purposed acoustic guitar pick-ups. As this technology became more accessible and affordable, so suddenly the sound of a traditional mbira band went from being a purely acoustic one to a fully amplified experience, enabling contemporary afro-pop bands to more easily incorporate the mbira into their music.

It was in this environment that I was first exposed to mbira music. In those days, Mbira dzeNharira and Mawungira eNharira were the two big rival bands on the local traditional mbira music scene. However the acclaimed mbira player Chiwoniso had made the sound international by experimenting and finding a sound that was more contemporary but one that still resonated with hardcore traditional mbira music fans. Musicians such as Adam Chisvo and Hope Masike experimented even more, pushing the mbira into jazz and a more contemporary, avant-garde direction.

After some time overseas I had come back to Zimbabwe in 2010 with my guitar and a notebook full of lyrics. I wanted to start a band and already had my own punk rock style, but I knew that I had to somehow fuse that with something more authentically Zimbabwean. I liked jit and chimurenga but I didn’t really know much about mbira music.

As I settled and became reacquainted with living in Harare I soon became a regular at the Book Café’s Monday open mic nights; I made friends with Hector Rufaro Mugani, an ethnomusicologist and mbira player who had studied at Zimbabwe College of Music, who organised the weekly Book Café event. It was during one of our early conversations (when I was telling him how I was looking for this “certain sound” but I didn’t know what it was yet; and he was telling me that he thought that the mbira instrument was trapped in the traditional mbira genre) when suddenly something in us just clicked. From that moment we began attending mbira shows together, both traditional and contemporary, and we started rehearsing.

Other times he would play traditional mbira songs and I would figure out how to simplify the complicated progressions into the minimum number of simple punk power chords. In acoustic rehearsals it sounded great but we often struggled with feedback when we tried to perform amplified on stage at the weekly open mic nights, accompanied by random drummers and bassists. It wasn’t quite working. Little did we know that Hector, with me bearing witness, was about to take the mbira instrument into another evolutionary stage – just as we hoped our sound would do for mbira music.

One Monday in early 2011, after the open mic night had ended and the customers and staff had all gone home, Hector and I took out the guitar amp and plugged in a prototype mbira that Hector had hand-built to incorporate electric guitar pick-ups instead of acoustic guitar ones. This had involved carving holes into the mbira’s wooden soundboard to house the pick-ups, as well as a lot of gaffer tape. With all the electronics and wires hanging out it looked a bit ominous and quite like a homemade bomb. We turned up the amp to a modest halfway point and the resulting sound that boomed out across Fife Avenue Shopping Centre exceeded even our wildest dreams. Suddenly everything was possible.

And so our band Chikwata.263 was born. In 2012 we were voted Mbira Band Of The Year by the Zimbabwean Mbira Society. I remember discussing our surprise at this accolade with the Mbira Centre’s Albert Chimedza. Chikwata.263 was very rough around the edges and didn’t have the tightness and polish of so many other mbira bands playing in the country at that time.

“Yes, but you guys are innovative,” he said. “You did something that no one else thought of before!” As he shared his thoughts on how mbira music needed to evolve, and that people needed to stop limiting the mbira instrument to only being used for “mbira music”, I remembered Hector sharing exactly the same sentiments when we first began to collaborate. Why couldn’t people play punk or blues or jazz on mbira? The answer was, of course, that people could but they just didn’t. Even the jump from traditional mbira music to contemporary was considered sacrilege by some traditional mbira players. The obvious truth however is that nothing is ever really static unless it’s dead. We knew that the mbira was alive and well and needed to be in a constant state of evolution.

Hector Mugani is now on his forth prototype for his electric mbira design. The wires and electronics have been incorporated into the model to make it look and feel more professionally constructed, and he’s trying to streamline his process for production. Meanwhile the Mbira Centre’s Albert Chimedza has elevated the production of his own Gonamombe-branded mbiras to the same high level of quality that any professional musician would expect if purchasing a known brand instrument such as a Gibson guitar or a Selmar Paris saxophone. As well as using the traditional mbira layouts and tunings, Albert has added a chromatic mbira to his production line so that anyone who can use the keyboard can pick it up and play.

If we truly want to preserve the mbira we must let it continue to evolve so that perhaps in another 1,500 years some musicians will come together to play their futuristic mbiras with digital displays and lights, somehow incorporating augmented reality or some technology we can’t even conceive of yet. But when they once more play the old songs of a bygone era they will channel us and remember their history, and the intergenerational connections across time will continue indefinitely into the future.

Words by Tomas Lutuli Brickhill

IG: @tomas_lutuli