Singing The Walls Down

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Join the heaving hundreds singing along with Thomas Mapfumo and you will see, hear, feel how music can be a liberating force. The whoops and cheers for the man they call the Lion of Zimbabwe have broken the quiet of a balmy January night in Mutare, a normally sleepy spread of jacaranda-shaded streets tucked amid the granite outcrops of the country's lush Eastern Highlands. In Queen's Hall, the revelers dance across a floor sticky with spilled lager, lost in the thump of the drums, the brassy blare of the horns and the hypnotic spell of the lyrics. Listen. What you hear isn't just Mapfumo's rasp through an amplifier. Mapfumo is the amplifier. "He is the voice of the people," says Ephraim, a businessman.

Despite the police, who watch, arms folded, the onlookers sing — no, shout — things they wouldn't dare say. The biggest singalong moment comes in Marima Nzara, a lament about a man with a big mouth who chases all the workers away. "You have lost the plot," everyone sings. "You have plowed hunger." Mapfumo never names the big mouth, but everyone knows it's President Robert Mugabe, who has led independent Zimbabwe for all of its 23 increasingly miserable years. "I'm just trying to reach the people," Mapfumo says. The roars that shake the packed hall suggest he's succeeding.

That same week, on the opposite side of the country, Oliver Mtukudzi — Mapfumo's former bandmate and the other giant of Zimbabwean music — is in Binga, a rural area on Zimbabwe's western edge. Binga is as hot, parched and brown as Mutare is cool, well-watered and green. Tuku, as he's known to friends and fans, settles down on a dusty wooden bench with his guitar. All day, he has been clapping his big hands, flapping his long arms, and high-stepping around the bare concrete floor of a thatched rondavel-turned-makeshift studio — anything to fire up the choir of aids orphans with whom he is recording a charity album. Unused to the rigor and repetition of a recording session, especially in this infernal heat, the children are wilting. It's time for a break — and it's Tuku's turn to sing.

A dozen kids cluster round, jostling for the best view of the fingers that sprint across the strings. Then Tuku's voice, strong and clear with a hint of gravel, silences the choristers as it launches into an improv medley: "What you do in the dark can be known in a day/ What you do behind closed doors can be known everywhere." "One, two, three, four child ... no go school, no food." And from his 1998 hit Todii, a question, originally about aids, but now so relevant to all of the country's crises, whether political, economic, natural or spiritual: "What shall we do?"

In Zimbabwe, the answer has always been to make music. Traditionally, the mbira (thumb piano) was used to summon spirits for help. Music was also Zimbabwe's oral newspaper, and the sung editorials often spurred action. In the '70s, when Ian Smith's whites-only government ruled what was then Rhodesia, says Mapfumo, "music inspired youngsters to fight that oppressive regime."

Zimbabwe is independent now, he says, "but the struggle is not yet won." In a land where most trickles of dissent are quickly dammed, Zimbabwe's two musical legends sing on and sing out like floods. They have different styles — the brash Mapfumo is more head-on political; Mtukudzi, the soft-spoken storyteller, prefers parables. But their songs are variations on a common theme — building a great Zimbabwe.

While Mugabe jets around the world, these two musicians rebuke and encourage the people back home. Protest songs may have largely died out in the West after the Vietnam era. But in southern Africa, where music is more than just a soundtrack to people's lives, they still matter. "When I sing, I am raising the Zimbabwean flag," says Mtukudzi. If Mugabe, nature and circumstance have brought the nation to its knees, then these patriots are singing "Stand up!"

You have to wonder whether Mapfumo and Mtukudzi are experiencing déją vu. Both rose to prominence in the Harare township of Highfields in the 1970s, during the country's final push for freedom. "In those days, blacks couldn't go into town after dark," recalls Charles Tavengwa, proprietor of the Mushandira Pamwe Hotel, the legendary nightspot where both men played early in their careers. "One of the only places they could come was the hotel." Mapfumo and Mtukudzi did more than sing. "There was always a message to the music," says Tavengwa. "They were singing for all Zimbabwe and rallying people together."

In 1977, Mtukudzi joined the Wagon Wheels, a popular band that also featured Mapfumo. But both soon broke away to find fame on their own. Mapfumo was always the more militant. His song Hokoya (Watch Out!) got him sent to jail for three months in 1977, and Pamuromo Chete ("It's Just Talking," 1978), an upbeat reply to Smith's vow that Africans would never rule, got blacks to join the independence battle. Mapfumo's music became so identified with the chimurenga — Shona for "struggle" — that the style was itself dubbed chimurenga. Two years later, as black Zimbabwe celebrated its liberation, Tuku and his band, the Black Spirits, hit the charts with Africa, an album filled with driving dance beats and heady optimism about the future.

For years, Zimbabwe did live up to its revolutionary promise. It was southern Africa's land of milk and honey — and maize and tobacco and beef. But drought and a botched land-reform program have decimated farming. Last week, a government report named prominent members of the ruling ZANU-PF, including Mugabe's sister and top officials, who had broken the "one man, one farm" rule for the redistribution of white-owned commercial farms. Zimbabweans had known this all along, but it was the first time the violations had been acknowledged at the top. Amid the chaos, production of maize, the staple of the diet, has plunged to 20% of 1999 levels. Inflation has officially soared to 200%; shoppers say the real rate is much higher. Price controls have only made things worse. On the black market, a loaf of bread goes for 10 times the official price — that is, if you can find one. Bakeries use the ingredients to make non-price-controlled products like rolls.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change should be leading the call for reform. And its members are, when not in court — leader Morgan Tsvangirai is on trial for treason, for allegedly plotting Mugabe's assassination — or jail. Indeed, it often seems as if ZANU-PF's only effective policy has been the systematic emasculation of the MDC. The repression means, as one Harare woman says, "we're all ZANU-PF on the outside, MDC on the inside."

In Binga, where Tuku is working with the orphans' choir, Zimbabwe's crises converge in one misery-ridden corner. City folk consider it Hicksville and still say the locals are so backward that they're born with two toes per foot. But they're suffering from worse things than outsiders' disdain. The area's 500-plus orphans know why the choristers wrote Iwe AIDS: "You killed my father, you killed my mother ... I remain all alone." Dry, cracked streambeds are evidence of the unbroken drought. Some villagers are eating tree bark. More than 150,000 in the Matabeleland North province rely on foreign food aid.

Here, as elsewhere, hardship is linked to politics. In the 2000 parliamentary elections, the mdc swept all eight seats in the province, its rural heartland. Last year, 61% of Matabeleland North voters chose Tsvangirai over Mugabe for President. Suffrage isn't supposed to bring suffering, but the people are still paying for their votes. "A family will walk 60 km to get maize meal at the [regime-run] Grain Marketing Board," says an aid worker. "They'll be told to come back the next day. When they do, it has all been given to people." Which explains the oft-told joke: ZANU-PF has no supporters, only beneficiaries.