Online Reporter
Isdore Guvamombe
Assistant Editor
ON a mountain foot in Guruve, Zimbabwe, baboons lounge nonchalantly on tree branches along a footpath while monkeys scamper nimbly between branches.
Then an excited whoop erupts, immediately joined by a dozen other voices, rising in volume, tempo, and pitch to a frenzied crescendo.
Each voice distinguishes between individual cries, pants, hoots, and screams that define celebrities, power brokers, and supporting characters. Like humans, they are quite a family!
This is a bonding ritual that allows baboon or monkey families to identify each other through individualised vocal stylisation. Family!
I am using this village tale of mountain baboons and monkeys as an intelligent artistic expression of the boondoggle on one of the trending stories of Zimbabwe’s Chimurenga music genre.
Am loosely using the word boondoggle to explain the wasteful, expensive, and pointless activity, such as promoting the tiff between Dr Thomas Mapfumo and Kurai Makore.
While it is the fad of our time to latch on to family disputes, nationalise and internationalise them on social media, Chimurenga is more important than anything.
There is no doubt that, to me, Chimurenga Music legend Dr Mapfumo is by all standards the best musician born on this soil. He is also Zimbabwe’s biggest music export to the international world, like or hate him.
Musically am Thomas Mukanya Mapfumo’s fan number 1. No day passes without me playing his music. His music fascinates me. His arrangement, the intensity of his instrumentation, vocal stylisation, and little everything else bring closure and finality to what I call music.
In recent years, Makore who is Mukanya’s son, has emerged following footsteps (you can call him cousin in British English registers), but am Shona and will insists in my culture Kurai is Mukanya’s son.
The family is known by the totem Soko Wafawanaka, the baboon, which is intermittently best replaced by Mukanya, the staggering gait of the baboon when it moves.
The story of Mapfumo and Makore is that of the baboon family, where the biggest is respected by all and sundry, but also where a future leader must emerge from the congress, for a group of baboons is called a congress in English.
Mapfumo and Makore need each other more at this stage than ever before.
The big Mukanya needs to be supported, albeit respectfully, by the young Mukanya.
They are family. The voices and illustrations in my introduction matter. The instrumentation and vocal stylisation.
Yes, the big baboon has legacy issues, has copyright issues, and everything else that goes with his work. But the younger, by my own admission and that of many others, has managed to re-popularise the old man’s music and market it to the young generation, born after Mukanya left Zimbabwe more than two decades ago.
It is fact, not fiction, that Kurai’s generational fans who are fed up with dancehall suddenly developed interest in Mukanya’s renditions at shows.
I can testify that one of my sons and her two sisters attended Kurai’s show and came back asking me for more of the bigger Mukanya’s play list.
Now Kurai needs to grow like his name means. He needs to develop his own songs, and he has done a lot as well for his age and given the complexities of assembling music under the Chimurenga genre.
In adult life, copying is very good, especially copying from the best like Dr Mapfumo. I have noticed that copying Dr Mapfumo’s music has made Kurai mature faster, like copying the style of Elvis Presley made Dr Mapfumo great in his heyday.
This is a family issue, and it is sad that it played out and spilled into social media and conventional media.
When done properly, Kurai is the only one so far with the capacity to promote Dr Mapfumo’s legacy and take it into the future.
And, as a family, it is time to sit down, digest, and let Dr Mapfumo’s legacy live forever. After squabbling for long hours during the day, baboons always troop back home at sunset to sleep, of course guarded and guided by the big one, Horomba.
Here Dr Mapfumo is the Horomba. Bhoo hoom, Bhoo hoom, Bhoo hoom! And, peace. Mukanya’s music lives on.
How good and how pleasant it would be before God and men to see Mukanya and his son perform together.
