By Ranga Mberi
Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi loved telling the story about the
exact moment he decided to be a professional musician. The decision was made on
a hot day, on a roadside somewhere in Salisbury’s Southerton industrial
district. He had blisters on his feet and a bottle of Sparletta in his hand.
It was the 1970s, and he had spent yet another fruitless
day scouring the city for a job.
He was on the 7km trek up the hill back to Highfield, the
township where he shared a room with his brother Robert. Shoes worn and nothing
in his belly, he was faltering when a man stopped him, sat him down and gave
him a soft drink.
“It was then that I started singing to myself,” Tuku told
an audience three years ago, laughing, while performing for them in Highfield.
“I started humming to myself; ‘Nhamo dzandimomotera, ini handidi nhamo [I am
surrounded by suffering. I don’t want to suffer anymore]’.”
In 1977, he recorded Nhamo Dzandimomotera. The song stayed
in the then charts for 38 weeks, 11 of those at number one. The song had come
just at the right moment; the black struggle for freedom had reached its peak.
“I realised that day that there can be a song for every
occasion,” Mtukudzi recalled, in 2016.
And, for the next four decades, until he died in a Harare
hospital on Wednesday, that is just what he provided. At the right moment, for
his people, Tuku always showed up with the right sound and the right words,
always on time.
There is a Tuku song for everything. We had Neria or Rufu
Ndimadzongonyedze when we needed to mourn, Shamiso for weddings and Totutuma
for graduations, Svovi Yangu for when we were in love and Pindurai Mambo when
we were pleading to the heavens for help.
Tuku gave us songs for every important era of this
country’s often troubled history, yet spent his years fighting invitations to
pick a side.
There was the Tuku of the 1970s, whose hunting song
Mutavara was a call to arms, and Gunguwo (The Crow), which mocked Bishop Abel
Muzorewa and his decision to reach a settlement with Rhodesians.
There was the Mtukudzi of 1980, on the cover of his album,
Africa, buttons open down to the chest, and a fist pumping the air. The sound
on the album, produced by South African West Nkosi, was unlike any other before
— edgy and vibrant. The cover and the music captured the euphoria; Zimbabwe is
free and we can do what we want.
There was the Tuku through the 1980s, in stonewashed jeans
and floral shirts in the Queens Garden, a spot loved by an upwardly mobile
black urban class. There was also Tuku in his tight jeans singing about the
“sound of freedom music in the air”, capturing the new-country zeitgeist in the
song Avenue Samora Machel.
There was the Tuku of the 1990s singing about HIV and Aids
when others still only spoke about it in whispers, and then Tuku challenging
patriarchy with Neria and Sandi Bonde.
In a country obsessed with political party identities, he
refused to be caged in.
He once said he never set out to be a political
commentator; just a singer who sang to his situation, just like that day on the
road to Highfield.
Having decided he would never find “real work”, Tuku joined
up with a local band and recorded his first song, Stop after Orange, in 1975.
It was a mesh of South African mbaqanga, rock and bits of local jazz. It earned
him only derision from fellow musicians.
“I said, ‘You, guy, why are you not singing in your mother
tongue?’” Thomas Mapfumo recalled in a later interview.
Mtukudzi and Mapfumo briefly toured together as the Wagon
Wheels, but the band never lasted. Without Mapfumo, Mtukudzi recorded
Dzandimomotera in 1977. It immediately found a place in the struggle for
independence. The freedom fighters took notice.
“They would give us a message that they wanted us to tell
the people. So we took these words and make up a song, of course, make it in a
clever way using proverbs that the then government wouldn’t understand, but the
people would understand,” Tuku told a BBC documentary after independence.
The 1990s was a decade of failure and success for Tuku’s
career, just as it was for Zimbabwe. When the film Neria came out, it redefined
Mtukudzi. The movie pried open the lid on a patriarchal society’s abuse of
widows.
His part in the film convinced Tuku to make a somewhat
disastrous decision. He took a role in the stage play Was My Child. He
abandoned the tour after being booed off the stage in Masvingo.
Meanwhile, the country was in crisis, suffering structural
adjustment austerity programmes and the worst drought in years. His audience
demanded gospel music and, as always, he had songs for the occasion. He
responded with a string of gospel albums such as Pfugama Unamate (Kneel Down
and Pray), featuring songs ripped from Methodist and Presbyterian hymn books.
“Our purpose as artists is to heal the people, to heal the
broken-hearted,” he said at the time.
Yet Tuku’s gospel years were some of the lowest times of
his career.
In the late 1990s, on a tour of Abidjan, he once again
changed direction. He hired Steve Dyer as producer, rebranded himself under
Tuku Music, and hired a new manager, Debbie Metcalfe. The result was the album
Tuku Music, which relaunched his career. The release spent 11 weeks at the top
of the CMJ New World Music charts.
The next year, violent election campaigns began. As they
had always done, the people looked to Tuku to sing about their situation.
When he released Bvuma in 2001, a song in which he begs an
elder to admit he is old, it was taken as a direct dig at Robert Mugabe.
Zanu-PF supporters frothed while those in the opposition took it as an
endorsement and played his music at their rallies. Still he refused to be drawn
to either side.
At a show that December, his lighting engineer was arrested
for repeatedly beaming a spotlight at Mugabe’s portrait inside the venue as
Bvuma played. Tuku’s music temporarily disappeared on radio.
“When callers call in asking for my music, they are told
the CD is not available or some such excuse,” he said later.
Zimbabweans, especially its celebrities, are often under
pressure to pick a side and blindly run with it. Tuku refused.
“Party politics will be the ruin of Africa, especially when
there are so many serious issues facing the country right now, like famine and
Aids,” he told interviewer Mai Palmberg in 2004.
Tuku’s insistence on independence drew criticism from
Mapfumo, who called him “two-faced”.
In 2005, when he sang at a private party to celebrate the
appointment of Joice Mujuru — who is from his rural home area — as
vice-president, a newspaper angrily called him “a bungling lunatic”.
Later, his urban fan base praised him for singing at
opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s wedding, then berated him for singing at
a Zanu-PF march in 2016, then praised him again for performing at the funeral
of Tsvangirai, where he sang Neria for the politician’s widow.
He insisted: “I am not partisan despite what people might
think. My music is there to unite.”
Once, at a government event, he sang the song Mukuru, in
which he urges leaders to lead by example. A team of fawning bureaucrats went
to his table to complain.
“They came and asked me, and I told them, well, if the
leader is being affected by this song then that means there is something wrong
with him,” he said.
Mtukudzi died on an unseasonably windy afternoon. As the
hearse exited the gates of the private hospital, the wind seemed to hush, only
for a while, as if to take a breath. In the car park where fans stood were also
politicians of all varieties.
In that brief silence, they must all have realised that we
had just lost one of our few genuinely good sides. Tuku was the voice that
softened the many blows that this country has had to take over the past
decades; the wars, the economic crises, the violence and the intolerance.
We were losing one of a few parts of Zimbabwe that we were
not ashamed to show the world. Tuku gave us Neria, the song a Kenyan will sing
with tears in her eyes, without understanding a single word, and the song the
South African customs guy still hums as he stamps your Zimbabwean passport.
Whatever our divisions, we came from the land of Tuku.
In our division and hate, Oliver Mtukudzi was the one happy
place we all went to for rest; coming from whatever political side, or from whichever
part of town.
At many of his shows, he would end with the refrain:
“Ndaakuneta. Ndaneta. Ndaenda [I’m getting tired. I am tired. I’m gone].”
Now he has. Originally published in the Mail and Guardian
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