Chronicle Editor
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
TO the average Zimbabwean music lover, Andy Brown is undoubted musical royalty.
If he never plucked another tune from his guitar, Andy Brown would be a legend just for his acoustic riffs on Ilanga’s True Love alone.
On that song, as he did on countless others through the years, Brown proved he was blessed with Midas’ fingers, with his golden touch on that occasion helping to create a masterpiece that is enduring as true love itself.
How many couples in Zimbabwe have walked down the aisle to that song, nudged forward gently, melodically by the voice of a young Busie Ncube, singing lyrics written by Brown? By the time, Brown’s acoustic guitar gets into a sparring much with Don Gumbo’s bass, Zimbabwean music history had been written and Andy had been one of its sure-handed authors.
To Zimbabwe, Brown left unforgettable melodies and memories, but to his children he bequeathed a remarkable heirloom, a name capable of opening doors and garnering instant respect at its mere mention wherever they go.
From the outside looking in, life as a child of this music icon might seem incredibly fascinating and rosy. For, Ammara Brown, however, childhood is a thorny subject, as she had to walk a path littered with the mistakes of a father whose fame and chosen vocation did not allow her to have a normal upbringing.
In an interview with Star FM during the week, Ammara revealed her father’s marriage to her mother, which was fraught with complications from an early stage. In fact, Ammara said some of her earliest memories including seeing her father with a woman named Maria, while he was also with the late Chiwoneso Maraire.
“I thank God my parents divorced. Their marriage was not healthy. I saw too much. I saw things I should not have seen. I had convinced myself that I had dreamt about certain things, as a child I couldn’t really process that some of these things were happening. Later in life my mother actually left me here in Zim. She left me here in Zim with my grandmother. I was about four in that time and they had been married for like three, four or five years at the time but I didn’t know at the time. I just remember having my grandmother around all the time and once in a while I would see my dad, closer to the time he was dating this woman named Maria. Maria and Chiwoneso were with my dad at the same time so it became this complicated entanglement all over the place. You see a lot of things but they were all so lovely,” she said.
Ammara said her father’s marriage to her mother had convinced against getting wedded, as she felt that she had got hitched to her father mainly because she was pregnant.
“When people stay in marriages just for the expectations of others and what they think is the right thing, I don’t think that’s healthy. I believe when I wake up next to someone, I want to be happy to do so no matter what we are going through. So, I knew that wasn’t it. My mother, as much as she loved my dad, I know she felt certain pressure (to get married) because she was pregnant. She was a baby and it was a different time so I am happy to have been born in the time I was born in and be able to live my life to the standards that I consider to be successful,” she said.
Ammara said it was only later on when she started to see how other children lived that she began to realise that her childhood had been far from normal.
“I am so happy that my mum was one of those people that got past her own traumas and elevated in order to make things simpler in terms of the dynamic with my dad and the women thereafter and the kids that were made thereafter. I remember the first child I fell in love with was my little brother Alex but at the time I was not really recognising that my upbringing was not normal. Only later when you go to parent teacher conferences, you realise that my parents are not here. My father would be like, ‘what are they to tell me about you?’ He had that kind of take on him but looking back, I did learn that it is important for people to be happy in their relations so when I was offered marriage by BaKhameel (her child’s father), I was like NO because I knew I would be happy,” she said.
While some might think the life of a child from such a well-known musical family would have a cushy upbringing, Ammara said she had failed to finish high school when her mother found herself down and out after her trucking company went bust. The only way for her to make money, her father told her, was to work for it. Like her father, she would thereafter become a rolling stone.
“I did not (finish school). I remember those were some really tough years. We moved back from the States when I was 14 and I worked behind my dad consistently from that period of time. However, my mother and stepfather had brought trucks and that side of the business crashed within a year. The workers were stealing parts, doing extra runs and my mother had to leave and star all over again. She said ‘I am going to the UK this time; I am sorry you guys you are going to go to your grandmother.’ So, it was a hassle and I remember going to my father and telling him, ‘Please can I have money, I want to buy toiletries’ and he gave me and said, ‘this is the last money I am giving you, if you want money, come here and start working’ and that’s how I started working,” she said.
As she joined her father as a backing vocalist, Ammara, who was gifted a mbira by her stepmother Chiwoneso when she was eight, had begun what now feels like a lifelong romance with the stage.
“I have not stopped working since. I would make money and I would bring it into the home. I would be taking care of my sister, my sibling or whoever I needed to help with whatever was needed. Unfortunately, when it came to writing my O Levels, no one could afford at the time. I think it was US$50 at the time. No one could afford for me to write my Cambridge exams and I was on tour with my father in South Africa at the time. They said why don’t you just stay here and you can finish high school and go to college from here but I didn’t even finish high school. My mother had no job, she was cooking sadza, I swear to God. She went from being realtor to cleaning toilets in the States,” she said.
Ammara admitted that while she was grateful for the experience that had help build her up to become the self-proclaimed Barefoot Goddess, she also regretted that she never got to experience a normal childhood.
The songbird also recalled argument between her mother and father which seemed to eventually led to her death.
“I didn’t have much of a childhood, in fact prior to that already, when I moved to the States, I now had to learn how to cook, how to clean, how to mother. There is no maid there, there is just you, good luck.
“Sometimes I would be pulled out of school to babysit my niece and my little sister, who was a newly born in the United States. That was important in a certain way because my parents died when I was young. I was 23 and I had just given birth. Six months later, my mum passed away, two months later my dad was gone. Nobody knew they were going to die that young. It was crazy, my mum was 46 and she had BP. She had a fight with my dad and that was it. She was screaming her head off and she just started complaining about her head. It just went too far and she had stopped taking her BP medication etc,” she said.
However, Ammara said although she had been performing with her father, she had started moving away from his shadow before his death, largely because of his abuse of alcohol, which was unhealthy for her as a young mother.
“He had his demons as an individual. He struggled with alcoholism and I was already trying to figure out how to detach myself from that life before he passed away. I was now a new mum and I would be like ‘its two o’clock in the morning dad, my breasts are leaking but you have gone into another club after our show’. So, all of these things are bittersweet and there are so many conversations I wanted to have with him that I hadn’t even processed yet but I never got to the opportunity,” she said.
Ammara, admitted that her relationship with her sister Chengeto had since broken down completely, admitted that her father left a lot of issues unresolved, which had continued to haunt them even after his death.
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