leeroySome sounds entertain and others remind.
At this year’s Bindura University of Science Education Innovation Week, the Graduate School of Business (GSB) stand did not merely display business products, but also opened a new portal into Zimbabwe’s Cultural Heritage, Indigenous Knowledge and Creative Economies.
Through the resonant, hypnotic tones of mbira, three custodians of Zimbabwe’s ancestral knowledge system reminded the nation and the watching world that heritage is not decoration for the past.
It is gnosis: living, working wisdom and belongs at the centre of the country’s industrial and economic future.
More Than Music: Mbira as Gnosis
To call mbira traditional music is to underdescribe it. Among the Shona people, the instrument is a vessel of gnosis: a structured, transmitted knowledge system connecting the living, the ancestors and the land. Its hosho-driven rhythms and cyclical melodic patterns encode cosmology, healing practice, historical memory and communal identity.
At the innovation week, this ancestral technology sat deliberately alongside robotics displays, agribusiness models and digital start-ups: not as nostalgia, but as proof that indigenous knowledge systems are themselves a form of innovation infrastructure, one Zimbabwe has carried for centuries and can now scale for economic benefit.
This is precisely the fusion the National Development Strategy 2 (NDS2) envisions when it identifies Cultural Heritage and Creative Industries as engines of economic growth: culture not as an ornament to the economy, but as a productive sector in its own right, capable of generating employment, foreign currency, and national brand equity.
The Ambassadors of Living Knowledge
Three figures anchored the GSB stand, each representing a different stage in the transmission of this gnosis.
Musekiwa Chingodza has carried mbira across continents, performing with distinction on tours through France, the United States and Japan, introducing international audiences to the instrument’s layered spiritual and musical architecture.
In May 2026, his decades of cultural diplomacy were formally recognised when he received a Certificate as a Global Cultural Ambassador, presented by Zimbabwe’s First Lady at mbira Festival: a moment that positioned him not merely as a performer, but as a state-recognised bearer of national soft power.
Sydney Mujuru stands alongside him, also honoured as a Global Cultural Ambassador by the First Lady, Dr Auxillia Mnangagwa. Mujuru’s recognition affirms a broader truth: that Zimbabwe’s mbira masters are not peripheral cultural figures but strategic assets in the country’s tourism and diplomatic outreach, individuals whose artistry has already opened doors in markets the country is working to grow.
Brighton Bvure represents the crucial next chapter: continuity. As the son of Samson Samaita Bvure, himself an appointed Cultural Global Ambassador, Brighton embodies the intergenerational transmission that makes gnosis sustainable rather than symbolic.
His presence at the GSB stand demonstrated to students and entrepreneurs alike that heritage industries have succession pipelines, mentorship structures, and a future workforce: exactly the qualities investors and policymakers look for in any sector.
Together, the trio’s presence at Innovation Week sent a clear message to the business and academic community: mbira is not a heritage footnote on a business school agenda. It is a case study in value creation.
From Ancestral Wisdom to Foreign Currency
Zimbabwe’s mbira masters, including Mudavanhu Magaya, Sydney Mujuru, Musekiwa Chingodza, Samson Bvure, Wilfred Nyamasvisva, Vee Mhofu, Alois Mutinhiri, Tendai Mavhengeni and many others, have for years quietly hosted and taught visitors from the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, drawing tourists whose interest is not in beaches or wildlife alone, but in participating, hands-on, in a living knowledge tradition.
Each visitor who travels to sit with a master, learn a pattern and understand its meaning is a foreign-currency earner, a repeat ambassador for the destination and a data point in the case that Creative Economies deserve serious investment.
This is the tourism proposition Zimbabwe can now brand with confidence: come experience living knowledge. Not artefacts behind glass, but instruction under a musokoto tree; not a museum plaque, but a hosho placed in your hands by a Global Cultural Ambassador.
It is an experiential, immersive tourism product that few destinations can authentically replicate, because it depends on an unbroken chain of transmission that Zimbabwe still holds.
Education 5.0 and the Business of Heritage
The GSB stand’s fusion of mbira and enterprise also illustrated Zimbabwe`s Education 5.0 philosophy in action: teaching, research, community service, innovation and industrialisation working as one system.
By staging ancestral knowledge inside a business school`s innovation showcase, Bindura University demonstrated that indigenous knowledge systems can be researched, formalised and industrialised without losing their integrity: heritage tourism packages, mbira-based creative enterprises, instrument-making value chains and cultural apprenticeship programmes are all viable business models waiting for structured investment.
Conclusion: Branding Zimbabwe Through What It Already Knows
Innovation is often imagined as something imported: new technology, foreign capital, borrowed models.
Bindura University Innovation Week offered a different lesson: some of Zimbabwe`s most exportable innovation has been resonating from calabashes and metal keys for generations.
Musekiwa Chingodza, Sydney Mujuru, and Brighton Bvure did not merely perform at the GSB stand; they demonstrated a national asset ready for branding, packaging and investment.
For Zimbabwe`s tourism strategy, the invitation is now clear and ready to be printed on every campaign: this is not a country asking visitors to observe its heritage from a distance.
It is a country inviting the world to sit down, listen, and learn: because here, wisdom is still alive, still teaching and still welcoming guests.
Come experience living knowledge. Come experience Zimbabwe.
Charles Mavhunga is a Zimbabwean scholar, Author, and Cultural ambassador currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Management at Bindura University of Science Education. He is the author of Mbira Virtuosos: Stories of Zimbabwean Mbira Legends (available on Amazon) and co-author of Business Enterprising Skills (Forms 1-4), textbooks published by Gramsol Books, Harare, and approved by Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. Recognised as a Global Cultural Ambassador, he is also a member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research for Africa (CODESRIA) and a weekly contributor to The Herald newspaper, where he has published over 300 articles on tourism branding. He can be reached at [email protected] or +263 772 989 816.
Online Reporter