Afro Pop legend Thomas Mapfumo to play rare, small club show@Southpaw
Thomas Mapfumo: The Lion of Zimbabwe will play a rare club show at SOUTHPAW on Wednesday, July 20th. Opening the show will be Brooklyn’s Akoya Afrobeat. BUY TICKETS HERE
Thomas Mapfumo has been a witness to and participant in history in his native Zimbabwe. From the bloody years of the country’s liberation war in the ‘70s, right through the present economic and political crises, Mapfumo has used his revolutionary, spiritually charged music to decry injustice and highlight the historical and cultural issues that underlie the news headlines. Mapfumo is a musical visionary and a fearless social critic and certainly one of the greatest African bandleaders of the past century,
Mapfumo was born in 1945 in Marondera, a small town south of the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury. He spent his first ten years living in the countryside with his grandparents, tending cattle herds, and waking up before sunrise to do chores before school. As Rhodesia edged toward racial civil war, Mapfumo lived a traditional life, mostly removed from the bitterness building in the cities and townships. One of his greatest pleasures was the music of his people, the Shona, music he experienced in family and clan gatherings not unlike those his ancestors had held for centuries. Traditional children’s tunes, songs of celebration accompanied by the drums called ngoma, and especially, the sacred music of the metal-pronged mbira, an instrument whose beautiful, cycling melodies could summon the presence of ancestor spirits. Traditional music is the foundation of Mapfumo’s musical personality, a force that continues to shape the history and spiritual life of his country.
When Mapfumo was ten, he moved to Mbare, the poorest and toughest black township of Harare (then called Salisbury). Life was different in the urban home of Mapfumo’s mother, stepfather, two brothers and two sisters. Mbare was a center of black protest against the Rhodesian regime, and a scene of random police actions designed to intimidate would-be rebels. Mapfumo’s stepfather was active both in a Christian church and in Shona traditional religious circles. He taught his children a highly moral worldview that saw no contradiction between the guidance of an almighty Christian God,
and that of Shona ancestor spirits. In Mbare, Mapfumo also heard radio for the first time, and he was wowed by African jazz from Johannesburg and Bulawayo, classic big band Rumba from the Congo, and especially, R&B and soul from America and England.
Mapfumo began to sing, and in high school, he joined his first band, the Zutu Brothers. For the next ten years, while the liberation war that would eventually transform Rhodesia into Zimbabwe roiled though the country, Mapfumo made his way as an itinerant singer. Both in the Cosmic Four Dots, the band where he learned basic musical skills, and in the far more successful Springfields, Mapfumo was the rock ‘n’ roll singer, the man charged with reproducing vocal performances by the likes of Elvis Presley, Bobby Darrin, Wilson Picket, and Mick Jagger. When the police came through his neighborhood one day demanding that everyone line up outside their houses, Mapfumo turned up in the shiny, Beatles-style silver jacket he wore on-stage. This playful show of disrespect nearly landed him in jail, where he’d have been lucky to escape with a beating. But a cop who was a Springfields fan stepped in to save him.
In 1972, Mapfumo moved to a mining town and started a band called the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band. The band got paid for entertaining the workers’ families, but had to work day jobs as well, including tending chickens in a “chicken run,” hence the name. It was here, working with guitarist Joshua Dube, that Mapfumo first adapted songs from the ancient mbira repertoire and worked them into the band’s Afro-rock repertoire. To sing in Shona was unusual, and in the context of the escalating war, automatically political.
So as Mapfumo continued to develop as a songwriter, his devotion to traditional music inevitably politicized him.
As Mapfumo moved on to work first with the Acid Band, and then with the Blacks Unlimited, everything came together. He developed his mbira pop sound with guitarists Jonah Sithole and Leonard “Picket” Chiyangwa, bassist Charles Makokova, and other innovative young players. Mapfumo’s lyrics reflected the concerns of the people around him—the hardships of rural life, young men heading into the bush to fight, and a rising sense of indignation at white rulers who had systematically devalued Shona culture for four generations. The guerilla fighters had taken the name chimurenga, Shona for struggle, and Mapfumo decided to call his new sound “chimurenga music.”
Mapfumo’s chimurenga singles captured the imagination of blacks nation wide. Near the end of war, the out-maneuvered Rhodesians arrested Mapfumo and attempted to use him to rally support for a last desperate attempt to hold onto some vestige of power. But the tide of history had turned, and in 1980, Robert Mugabe was elected president of a new nation. That year, Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited shared the stage with Bob Marley and the Wailers at the national celebration of Zimbabwean independence.
As Zimbabwe took its first hopeful steps, Mapfumo sang rallying songs for the new leaders. But if the new leaders imagined him a loyal praise singer, they soon learned otherwise. For though Mapfumo had become a national hero by singing theme songs for a revolution, his deeper message was really about social justice and culture, not politics. Zimbabweans had been brainwashed by the Rhodesians, tricked into abandoning their ancestral ways. Black rule was only a first step toward the cultural renaissance Mapfumo envisioned. When leaders began to reveal themselves as corrupt and lacking in vision for the nation, they found themselves in Mapfumo’s artistic crosshairs. In 1989, Mapfumo decried sleaze and graft in the song “Corruption.” The next year, in “Jojo,” he warned young people not to let themselves be used by dirty politicians.
The music also evolved. In the late ‘80s, Mapfumo introduced first one, then two, then three mbiras to the band lineup, and he came to think of them as core of the Blacks Unlimited sound. He challenged his guitarists, horn players and keyboard players to accommodate themselves to the mbiras, and he challenged his mbira players to learn the African jazz, and “jit” songs that were also key elements in the chimurenga sound. The band began to tour internationally, and made landmark recordings for Chris Blackwell’s Mango Records, Corruption (1989) and Chamunorwa (1990).
In the ‘90s, Mapfumo faced a choice between devoting himself to an international career and keeping the home fires burning. For him, this was no choice at all. He toured and released his music abroad when possible, but he kept his energies focused on Zimbabwe, releasing a set of new songs every year, and playing as often as five nights a week during peak season. A Blacks Unlimited concert in Zimbabwe is an extraordinary communal experience. It begins at 8:00 in the evening, and can last until daylight. It includes deep
mbira anthems, rollicking township dance grooves, and refracted glimmers of reggae, R&B, and African jazz. The songs decry alcoholism, AIDS, domestic violence, and people’s devotion to foreign things—all prices Zimbabweans have paid for abandoning their ancient culture, in Mapfumo’s view.
By the summer of 2000, conditions in Zimbabwe had deteriorated badly, in part as a result of President Mugabe’s aggressive and violent program of seizing white-owned farms. Mapfumo songs perceived as critical of the government were unofficially banned from state controlled airwaves, effectively, all airwaves. Feeling pressure on many sides, Mapfumo moved his family to the United States that year, and since then, he and the band have been spending much of the year based in Eugene, Oregon. As the situation
in Zimbabwe has declined steadily, virtually all Mapfumo’s recent music has now been banned, and government-controlled press outlets have for the first time begun to write negatively about him. Despite growing risks, Mapfumo continued to return to Zimbabwe with the band to play traditional year-end concerts for as long as he felt safe doing so. However, he has not returned to Zimbabwe since 2004.