adminFred Zindi Music
MBIRA virtuoso Chiwoniso Maraire should never be forgotten. She did a lot in her short but productive life. Chiwoniso was full of rich musical energy. In short, the creative genius found in Chiwoniso should never be buried with her. In her short but rich musical career, she became a national cultural heritage itself. As Stephen Chifunyise puts it: “She performed the most distinctive performing arts heritage of the Shona people clearly as a disciplined and appointed custodian of a mbira heritage with a mature handling of its intricate spirit.”
I first met Chiwoniso through her father, Abraham Dumisani Mararire, in 1983, when she was seven years old. The thing that impressed me most was the fact that although she sounded American when she spoke in English, she also could speak Shona very eloquently.
When her father, the late Dumi Maraire returned home from the United States of America, he joined the then Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture, in the Department of Arts and Crafts with a responsibility of promoting the performing arts industry. He later joined the University of Zimbabwe as an ethnomusicology lecturer in the Department of African Languages.
In his mbira promotion workshops with cultural officers in the ministry, Dumi Maraire advocated for Zimbabweans to take mbira music and instrument as a unique cultural heritage that would be a major identifying characteristic of Zimbabwe’s music industry. He did not care whether the instrument was played by a man or a woman. To prove his point, he taught his own daughter, Chiwoniso, to play the mbira. He also tried to introduce mbira music in the Methodist Church but this effort was met with a lot of resistance. His passion for cultural heritage was not appreciated by those who had received years of Western education, but he was adamant.
Chiwoniso, as a young person became Dumi’s cultural messenger after she learnt how to play mbira.
Chiwoniso was born in 1976 in Olympia, Washington, US where her father had gone to study. After our brief meeting in 1983, I did not see her again until much later when she was in secondary school at Mutare Girls’ High. She had formed her own band called A Piece of Ebony.
In 1990, at the age of 14 she had become an accomplished singer and songwriter. She teamed up with her father and was a regular at the University of Zimbabwe’s Annual Arts Festival. She became popular with the rowdy UZ hooligans (UBA).
I further interacted with Chiwoniso when she attended the Zimbabwe College of Music where I was teaching the National Certificate in Music programme. It was there that I discovered that she was not only accomplished in mbira playing, but that she also possessed a golden singing voice.
When Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver Mtukudzi came to visit the college at my invitation, I asked Chiwoniso and another student, Miriam Mandipira, to stand up and sing for them. They were impressed. A year later Kanda Bongo Man from the DRC visited the college and I again asked Chiwoniso and Miriam to sing for him. He too was impressed and he asked me if he could take them to the DRC to become his backing singers. I asked Kanda Bongo Man to stipulate his conditions before taking them. When he became evasive, the deal was off.
Chiwoniso later joined The Storm, an Afro-beat band led by Andy Brown with whom she later had two children – Chengeto and Chiedza. After Chiwoniso broke up with Andy, she moved in with a poet popularly known as Comrade Fatso and she formed her own mbira-based band in the early nineties. She started to do her own recordings and one of her early recordings, “Mai” is dedicated to her late mother, Linda Nemarundwe.
In 1995, Chiwoniso recorded an album, “Ancient Voices” where she mixed the traditional and modern beats, and she sang in English and Shona using both contemporary instruments and traditional African instruments such as the mbira, hosho and ngoma.
Chiwoniso was the leader of her acoustic group Chiwoniso & Vibe Culture since 2001. From 2001 to 2004, she was also a core member of the multinational all-women band Women’s Voice, whose original members hailed from Norway, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, America, Israel and Algeria. Chiwoniso was also involved in filmmaking, having worked on the soundtracks for movies and documentaries by an array of Zimbabwean writers and film producers.
In February 2006, she joined Busi Ncube, Adam Chisvo, Peter “Mashasha” Mujuru, Louis Mhlanga and many other Zimbabwean artistes in an ad-hoc band called The Collaboration and recorded “Hupenyu Kumusha, Life at Home, Impilo Ekhaya”. The band performed in Zanzibar’s Sauti za Busara 2007 Festival.
In September 2008, Chiwoniso released her fourth album and first international album in over 10 years, “Rebel Woman”. The album perfectly mirrors Chiwoniso’s life in the regard that she sings about all personal experiences. From her own spirituality to a passer-by on the street, every song in “Rebel Woman” was influenced by a specific event in her life. In this album, she blends ancient, African soul, with modern spirit accompanied with the melodies of the mbira and deep grooves.
In late 2008, Chiwoniso moved back to the United States where promoters arranged a tour of Europe and Canada for her. She returned to Zimbabwe in 2010.
In her stage performances, Chiwoniso not only reminisced her late father’s passion for mbira music but also his respect for that cultural heritage which she rejuvenated using English, in many cases, in order to accommodate a wider audience base while consistently echoing the feel of indigenous mbira sounds.
The many young Zimbabwean musicians such as Hope Masike, Rutendo Machiridza, Onai Mutizwa and the Dominican Convent Mbira Group who played at her funeral wake got inspiration from Chiwoniso’s passion. She showed them the way and taught Zimbabweans to be proud of mbira as a cultural heritage. genre into a viable cultural industry product that remains emblematic of our rich cultural heritage.
It is very easy to take it for granted that Chiwoniso’s father, the late Dumi Maraire, Thomas Mapfumo, Stella Chiweshe, the late Sekuru Gora, Beulah Dyoko, Oliver Mtukudzi and David Gweshe, just to mention a few, as elderly musicians would naturally romance mbira music, but when a young person with Western education becomes a robust exponent of very tradition entrenched mbira aesthetics, we marvel at the rarity of such ingenious youth. Chiwoniso was an embodiment of that ingenious youth that possesses abundant knowledge and value of a cultural heritage bequeathed to them.
Chiwoniso demonstrated how a singing voice that is well grounded in uniquely indigenous vocal texture and potency can be innovatively utilised to rend songs in English or other foreign languages and musical instruments to produce a clearly identifiable Zimbabwean sound that remains authentic even when handled with a creativity that benefited from wide contacts with other music of the world.
Chiwoniso was a brilliant analyst of mbira music – its cultural and historical context and its uniqueness as a most expressive of the spiritual dimensions of our performing arts heritage. In her speeches about mbira music and the mbira instrument, she exhibited an incredibly rich knowledge of its functions and value in the traditional Shona society as well as what mbira music meant to her and what role she was playing in promoting its mastery and processes of safeguarding that cultural heritage.
She was a gifted music educator whose major strength was her ability to demonstrate accurately, the skills to be acquired. As a master who had benefited from observing her father and mother as a member of Mhuri yekwaMaraire, she appreciated the value of clarity in demonstrating a performing arts skill.
Having listened for two weeks now, to several messages of condolence from both the young and the old, which were conveyed on our six radio stations and different social media and contained in several articles in all our newspapers, there is no doubt that all these were vivid and passionate expressions of the fact that Chiwoniso was a hero of our ongoing struggle for continued respect for and viable exploitation of our rich diversity of cultural expressions.
Cultural legends of this quality are celebrated not just for the value of what they have created but also for leaving behind works that will for generations show the way. Chiwoniso has effectively played her cultural heritage promotion role and should never be forgotten. She leaves us with the task of continuing where she has left.
As our responsibility in honour of Chiwoniso, the National Arts Council of Zimbabwe, the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe College of Music and all other institutions which care about music, should all hang portraits of the late Chiwoniso on their walls. That way, we will remember her forever. May her dear soul rest in eternal peace!
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