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Book: Lion Songs
Author: Banning Eyre
Publisher: Duke University Press (2015)
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5908-1
Zimbabwe is in birth pangs. Decolonisation is at high tide but the black majority has no culture industry equal to the war effort.
Township culture is a cosmopolitan blend. Western covers, moody jazz numbers and spiritually bankrupt pop revolving around instant pleasure and purposelessness, define the music industry of the day.
In 1972, a gangly Mbare artist earning his bread in the copper town of Mhangura breaks away from Western covers, infuses mbira strains into his repertoire and a whole new movement is born.
In the years leading up to Independence, Thomas Mapfumo presses politically charged ditties to vinyl, guitar riffs aping mbira mysticism, and the black majority sways along.
If this is an oversimplification of the musical landscape of the time – the children of tribulation indeed expressed their condition in sundry notes too complex to be bundled in a Western blanket – it still speaks to the novel impact of Chimurenga music for a nation then rediscovering its identity beyond imperial constructs.
Mapfumo turned the Harare hit parade on its head with “Pamuromo Chete,” “Pfumvu Paruzevha,” “Vana Kuhondo” and other war-inspired songs, all set to the Shona music tradition, and became perhaps the closest personification of cultural nationalism.
Since that defining break, Mapfumo’s career, consistently steeped in political controversy, has taken many dramatic turns but the man remains the towering icon of a revolutionary era.
“Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Music that Made Zimbabwe,” a 2015 biography by Banning Eyre, is a collage of close-up portraits from a writer who has enjoyed 25 years of friendship and a professional relationship with Mukanya.
While the book suffers from lop-sided political commentary, likely the result of the biographer overstretching his narrative, it is a masterly portrayal of Mapfumo which goes way beyond the surface.
Eyre’s verbal facility and a sustained omnibus of anecdotes furnishes his audience with a difficult subject whose career is a contrasting timeline trail-blazing achievements and career-threatening compromises.
An able narrator and meticulous observer, Eyre gets into the spirit of his subject, even sharing marijuana with members of the Blacks Unlimited, understudying the guitarists and performing with the band to the delight of fans who nicknamed him Mrewa.
The book is divided in three parts “Rhodesia,” “Zimbabwe” and “America,” the latter part singularly spelling an anti-climax to an otherwise adventurous career.
Thomas Mapfumo was born Michael Munhumumwe in 1945 at Imbwa Farm in Kandege and raised by his mother’s people in Marondera.
He had a childhood of a sort which involved waking up at 2AM to plough or mind cattle before going to school. “Once he recalled asking his grandfather permission to bathe. The old man replied, ‘Why do you want to wash? Is it Christmas?’” Eyre recounts.
Nephew to the late Jit great, Marshal Munhumumwe, Mapfumo experimented with musical possibilities in earnest when he joined his mother and siblings in Harare under the watch of a strict, orthodox, Bible-quoting stepfather.
Other artistic kinships in Mapfumo’s family tree include late Shona novelist and finance minister, Bernard Chidzero and highly regarded poet and scholar Musaemura Zimunya.
Active chat heads in “Lion Songs” include men of letters Zimunya, the late Chenjerai Hove, Alexander Kanengoni, Fred Zindi and Geoff Nyarota, promoters and noted Blacks Unlimited guitarists Jonah Sithole and Joshua Dube, both deceased.
Mapfumo comes across as a loud character, aiming humorous barbs at just about everyone, from Alick Macheso and rhumba musicians to women and Pope John Paul II, such that if the urban myths about him do not have an element of truth then they have an element of character.
“There was a story in The Herald about the pope’s bodyguards. ‘Why does he need bodyguards? Mapfumo boomed, switching to English. ‘He knows if he dies he is going to heaven. He is a holy man,’” Eyre recounts Mapfumo’s barb.
“‘Did you know that there are phones at the Vatican and you can speak your prayers into that phone? Who is supposed to be at the other end? Is that God?’” Mukanya continues his “heretical” joke.
Mapfumo himself was a brought up in a syncretistic set-up, with his mother juggling spiritism and Christianity like many African families. The former had a more enduring influence on him.
As a young man, he would relish his first encounter with his biological father as the discovery of his bloodline would enable him to invoke his ancestral genealogy beginning with his father in terms of Shona traditional religion.
Mapfumo’s traditional belief would take him to n’angas and mystic rituals, at one time almost running afoul the law of the land for labelling his relative a murdering sorcerer at the strength of divination.
His evolution as a musician included performances with amateur bands such as Zutu Brothers, Cosmic Four Dots, Springfields, Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and Wagon Wheels.
Itinerant bands mostly set out on jazz and pop covers. Mapfumo and friends went to Mhangura to play at the mine but were required to find day jobs.
“The story goes that when Thomas and Elisha Josam found work at the local chicken run Walker (the mine boss) exclaimed, ‘Hallelujah!’ That sounded like a band name to the musicians, but wasn’t satisfied and said, ‘Why don’t you call yourselves Hallelujah Chicken Run Band?’” Eyre recounts.
It was with this band that Mapfumo co-composed his first hit single “Ngoma Yarira.” Noted for its mbira feel, the single set the stage for the cultural ambassador Mapfumo came to represent.
His voice became one of the deepest on the cultural front of the decolonisation effort, along with Oliver Mtukudzi and Zexie Manatsa, a distinction which set him on a warpath against the Smith administration.
Compromise performances for Abel Muzorewa during the short-lived but atrocious Zimbabwe-Rhodesia government saw Mapfumo falling out of favour with the comrades, though he soon resumed his revolutionary repertoire.
He assumed the watchdog role in post-colonial Zimbabwe and belted out the song “Corruption” to warm reception in the wake of Willowgate in 1998.
Eyre allows that Mapfumo’s career was “certainly compromised, if not ruined by his move to America.” While his concern is primarily the business expediency of the move, the observation can be extended to Mapfumo’s stature as an artist.
Although he has ever been the political meddler, Mapfumo’s wane sets when he compresses his artistic space to an almost personalised crusade against President Robert Mugabe’s administration.
He cuts away from the sunny lyricism of the early years when the ambitions, struggles and frustrations of everyday people, rather than simplistic dichotomy of political entities, informed timeless repertoire.
Self-exiled, cut away from the people whose sentiments and impediments were his creative current, he cedes his nationalistic command with a questionable lyrical drift.
In “Big in America” Mapfumo proclaims: “Everything is big in America/ Everybody wants to be in America;” whereas he tells his biographer elsewhere that he hates Zimbabwe because of its leaders.
“Marima Nzara” pours scorn on the land reform programme; Mapfumo even gives interviews to fault not just the handling but also the idea of redistributing land to poor blacks.
Eyre recounts an episode when the only black man on a panel discussion “Thomas raised eyebrows when he called on Britain and America to intervene with force in Zimbabwe, to overthrow Mugabe and his ‘torturers.’”
This classic changeover has compromised the resume of a man whose accession was principally powered by his nationalistic fervour and commitment to the disenfranchised majority.
Oliver Mtukudzi’s biographer, Shepherd Mutamba, has a different take on the place of the artist in the corridors of power and endorses Mapfumo’s approach, while taking a moralistic broadside at Tuku for staying away from the political turf.
“Artists who subordinate themselves to political whims cannot be the voice of the people. We can now only look to Thomas Mapfumo who has not faltered on political criticism and resistance,” Mutamba writes.
However, the assumption that a musician must locate a position in the transient politics of the day seems to me dark counsel, promising at best fluctuating fortunes as such a role is more journalistic and artistic.
Notwithstanding the questionable choices, Eyre affirms Mapfumo’s enduring stature in the canon of Zimbabwean music. “Lion Songs” is a fascinating biography not just for its close-up portrayal of Mapfumo, but also its masterly commentary on Zimbabwe’s underrated music industry.