The Lion in Winter

Rise Up includes a remake of an early classic, “Mukadzi Wangu” (my wife). The original was raw and dangerous, featuring a spare tangle of darkly insistent guitar lines, the sound of The Blacks Unlimited before keyboards or actual mbiras. The new version is grander, cushioned in sonorous mbira lines and adorned with blankets of vocal harmony. Mapfumo often reprises old songs to demonstrate Zimbabwe’s return to struggle, its ongoing chimurenga. In this song, a man explains to his wife that he must leave the country to support their family. No changes to the lyrics were required.

When Mapfumo sings or talks about his music, he seems every bit the man who knows where he is coming from and where he is going. When we met, however, his life was in limbo. He was between managers, between record companies, between homes—his wife and three children living in one house in Eugene, his band in another—and most of all, between countries, wanting desperately to go back to Zimbabwe and reconnect with his public, but knowing that the risk was too great. Since he began singing publicly in 1962, last year was the first time that Mapfumo did not perform his traditional year-end shows in his homeland.

I lived in Harare in 1997 and 1998, a time when Mapfumo and his seventeen-member band performed as often as five nights a week. Shows would begin at around 8:30 with The Blacks Unlimited playing instrumentals as the crowd gathered. Mapfumo would saunter onstage at around ten o’clock for an initial two-hour set. The second set would begin at 1 a.m. and finish by around 4 a.m. For special shows, like Christmas, New Year’s, or Easter, there would be a third set, ending after sunrise to make the show officially a pungwe—named for the all-night singing sessions the guerrillas used to hold to stiffen the spines of villagers during the war. By the end of every Mapfumo show, the entire crowd would be in a trance, swaying, and stomping out traditional rhythms. Songs warned against drinking—which Mapfumo quit in 1978—but nearly everyone would be drunk. They warned against infidelity, but the room would be full of guys on the make, prostitutes at work, and countless aids ghosts. They warned against abandoning the council of the ancestors, against the manipulations of politicians who pay the young to do their dirty work, against evils and misdeeds that were part of the lives of everyone present. Like sinners in the grip of Pentecostal catharsis, Mapfumo’s public revelled within the ecstatic, spiritually charged space that only his music could generate. A new generation of Zimbabweans is now coming of age without access to this experience. Meanwhile, Mapfumo ekes out a living as a world-music exotic.

The only Mapfumo music released in Zimbabwe last year was a poorly produced, illegal bootleg recorded at a concert in Milton Keynes, England, last May. On it is a song called “Masoja Nemapurisa,” which ridicules a leader who calls on soldiers to beat his critics. Explaining it, Mapfumo told me, “Maybe one day the soldiers and the police will say, ‘No, we don’t want to go out there and beat up the people for nothing.’” The song hit such a nerve that when the CD was released in Harare in November, youth gangs organized by Mugabe’s zanu-pf party descended on the flea markets and tried to destroy every copy.

“That song made them very, very angry,” said Mapfumo, mildly amused at the brouhaha he had caused, “but we were not mentioning names. We were just trying to give advice.” Back in 1979, Mapfumo faced Rhodesian interrogators who insisted he was singing politics. “No,” he replied with similar indirection. “These are just traditional songs. This is our culture.” The Rhodesians sent him to Chikurubi Prison anyway. Today, Mapfumo’s prison is a rental car in New York City.