“So we were up there on the stage and we were playing copyrighted music. The last song that we were playing was The Last Time by The Rolling Stones,” he says, breaking into song. “There was this white guy in the audience. And he started shouting at us, ‘Shut up, you k****rs!’ It made me very, very angry. I thought well, if these people can’t allow us to sing in their language, don’t we have our own language to sing? That made me change my mind. From there on, I stopped playing copyrighted music.”
This moment was essential in nurturing Mapfumo’s political consciousness. “I thought … if we don’t play our own music, how are we going to promote our own culture?” He began singing in his mother tongue, Shona, from that day onwards.
Throughout the interview, Mapfumo enthrals with descriptive tales of his early bands and adventures in different Zimbabwean cities. This includes the story behind the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band formed in 1972, while members worked on a chicken farm in the copper mining area of Mhangura.
Struggle songs
Mapfumo’s contribution to music involves tuning the mbira – the spiritual sound of the Shona – to the electric guitar. “As a boy I grew up in the rural areas, where there was a lot of traditional music. I was a herdboy herding cattle and goats. I listened to a lot of mbira music and also drumming and singing. I thought, is this music not danceable? … All we have to do is change the music and promote it.” This combination of mbira, rattles and drums originally played at gatherings for the ancestors was tweaked to modern electrical instruments, to create a danceable sound.
His early lyrics contained messages against the colonial regime and promoting the Zanu-PF revolution. The electrification of the mbira, coupled with the protest lyrics embedded in the music, soon became known as chimurenga music. “We decided to name it chimurenga music when the liberation war broke out in our country … We made our first hit through supporting the struggle.”
Among many singles, one was immensely popular at the time. It was a song about the war that encouraged people to fight, called Tumira Vana Kuhondo, which translates as “send children to war”.
At first, it was played on the radio because the authorities could not decipher what it was about – a common thread in chimurenga music was having coded meanings. When the regime figured it out, Mapfumo was arrested for supporting the struggle. He has been arrested, detained and harassed repeatedly throughout his career.
Mapfumo is wearing a T-shirt with reggae icon Bob Marley printed on it during the interview. “In Jamaica, I even took a picture of myself sitting on the statue of Bob Marley. I like him because every song that he created was really great with great messages.”
The two artists are connected in many ways, most closely in their messages of revolution and uniting Africa. They are also connected through Zimbabwe’s independence, which was marked by a massive midnight concert featuring Bob Marley and the Wailers on 17 April 1980. It was an electrifying moment in history, at the Rufaro Stadium in Harare.
Mapfumo performed at the same concert. “We were the last band to play. It was very good … but the way we were treated that time wasn’t good for us. They [the government] looked down on us like we never did anything for them. Yet my band played a very big part during the liberation struggle. There is no other band that did that.”
