Remembering Oliver Mtukudzi

‘‘Why do we sing, why is there art? Art is to give life and hope to the people. Art is for healing broken hearts. Like in Zimbabwe, you don’t sing a song when you have nothing to say.’’ – Oliver Mtukudzi

On 23 January 2019, Oliver Mtukudzi, whose singing and guitar playing harnessed influences from across Southern Africa to create the most popular musical style in Zimbabwe, died at the age of 66 in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. A record executive and promoter who had worked with Mtukudzi for more than 20 years, Damon Forbes, said the cause was heart failure related to diabetes.

Oliver Dairai “Tuku” Mtukudzi was born on 22 September 1952, and grew up in Highfield, Salisbury (now Harare), in the then Ian Smith-ruled Southern Rhodesia, which together with South Africa were notorious of being governed by racist white settler regimes. His father died just as Mtukudi was entering adulthood. He then took a job at a bookstore to support his family, while he filled every idle moment practicing on the guitar that a musician had given him after noticing his preternatural ability. He began performing in 1977 when he joined the Wagon Wheels, a band that also featured Thomas Mapfumo, nicknamed the “Lion of Zimbabwe”, and fellow guitarist James Chimombe.

The Wagon Wheels were given the rare opportunity by Paul Tangi Mhova Mkondo, an African nationalist, entrepreneur and music promoter, who provided money and resources to the group. Mkondo allowed the group to perform at Club Mutanga (“Pungwe”) which, at the time, was the only night club for Africans during the racist Smith’s Rhodesia. The group won gold with their single “Dzandimomotera”, which precipitated Mtukudzi’s first album, “Ndipeiwo Zano” in 1978, during the final days of the Zimbabwean revolution, with his own band, the Black Spirits. The album became a major success and was re-released in 2000. Mtukudzi was also a contributor to Southern Africa’s “supergroup”, Mahube, which played a combination of mbaqanga, rumba and maskanda music that remained a unique sound much rooted in Africa. The music also incorporated old traditional songs like “Ilanga Litshonile” with their own unique interpretation.

Starting in the late 1970s, Mtukudzi recorded numerous albums — 67, according to his count — and became a hero throughout Africa that the Zimbabwean music journalist Alex Magaisa maintained was “arguably Zimbabwe’s finest ambassador.” Conservative estimates suggest that Mtukudzi sold millions of albums during his 40 years as a solo artist. He sang typically in Shona, Zimbabwe’s predominant language, but also in English and Ndebele, anthems of social lament and timeless wisdom, as his music pulled from traditional Shona rhythms and sounds while incorporating influences from South Africa’s more cosmopolitan, jazz-inflected mbaqanga tradition, as well as African-American dance music. Accordingly, this resulted in a kind of soundtrack to Zimbabwean life in the late 20th century that became known as its own idiom, called “Tuku music,” after Mtukudzi’s nickname.

With his unique sound, his husky voice, Mtukudzi became the most recognised voice to emerge from Zimbabwe and onto the international scene and he earned a devoted following across Africa and beyond. What also made his music exceptional was the manner in which he played his guitar, such that, according to Mtukudzi, “professional guitarists at the time used to laugh at me. I used to look for a mbira on the guitar strings,” he said, referring to a traditional Shona thumb piano. Actually, “I looked for a sound the guitar couldn’t make, in a guitar‚” he said in an interview shortly before his death, remembering his early years.

Mtukudzi’s popularity in Zimbabwe reflected the fact that in a country bitterly divided by political allegiances, he positioned himself as a unifier. As opposed to Thomas Mapfumo, who took a strong political stance in his music, pioneering a genre known as Chimurenga music, a “revolutionary struggle music” in Shona before the fall of white minority rule, and later vigorously criticising Robert Mugabe, Mtukudzi generally avoided taking a political side. He sang at events for the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party, as well as the wedding and funeral of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Nevertheless, his songs boldly told the stories of his communities, and he made no effort to avoid social issues. Many of his songs urged government leaders as well as everyday people to focus on the well-being of Zimbabwe’s children, while Mtukudzi did throw the occasional veiled political swipe.

Undoubtedly his biggest hit was “Todii”, a cautionary song about the perils of HIV and AIDS from the 1997 album “Tuku Music”. The song was powered by a melancholy chorus of background singers and the gravelly lament of Mtukudzi’s lead vocal, warning listeners of the virus that by then had infected a large part of Southern Africa’s population. “Neria,” from 1993, was another popular song that told of a woman thrown into poverty by a law that kept her from inheriting her husband’s property. It became a soundtrack for a feature film of the same name, and it so impressed the filmmakers that nine years later, they made “Shanda,” a documentary about Mtukudzi that documented him as he toured Zimbabwe.

In 2001 Mtukudzi released a song, “Wasakara”, which meant “You are worn out,” and was widely interpreted as a plea for Zimbabwean President Mugabe to step down. Paul Mangwana, a senior Zimbabwean government official, said Mtukudzi “was a nation builder”. “Where it was necessary to criticise he would, and where it was necessary to praise he would”.

When Mtukudzi arrived in SA, his music immediately resonated with locals. It also helped that he was versatile, finding it easy to perform and record with local artists such as Ringo Madlingozi. Whether performing at a corporate function in Joburg, at a packed Dome with Hugh Masekela, at a benefit concert with Yvonne Chaka Chaka or on an album with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Mtukudzi always left a lasting impression on the minds and souls of those who heard him. Mtukudzi was one of a group of African musicians – alongside the likes of Masekela – who were invited back time and again for representing something which was at once soothing and liberating, always reminding their audiences that Africa was still one.

During the last 15 years of his life, he ran an arts complex he founded in 2003 in Norton, a town 40 kilometres west of Harare, called the “Pakare Paye Arts Centre”. The arts centre had a recording studio, classrooms and performance spaces, as it aimed to offer young people a creative and social outlet that would help combat unemployment and listlessness. In 2011 he was named a UNICEF regional good-will ambassador for Eastern and Southern Africa, in recognition of a song, “Deaf Hear”, which he wrote in observation of UNICEF’s Day of the African Child.

Throughout his career, Oliver Mtukudzi kept his family and his work entwined. Robert, his brother, was his keyboard player until he died in 1992. His daughters often sang background vocals and helped him compose most of his songs. Mtukudzi defined his approach to music intimately saying, “According to my mother‚ she believed that I will never come up with a song that surpasses my birth cry. From that‚ I’ve been making music to compare to that first cry. What my birth cry meant to my mother, that is the kind of music I make.”

Castro Khwela
Good morning fellow Compatriots!