All About the Living Legend: Thomas Mapfumo
Thomas Mapfumo (born 1945 in Marondera, Zimbabwe) is a Zimbabwean musician and composer who rose to fame around independence in the 1970s and is known for not only being a brilliant musician but as an important revolutionary and powerful advocate of social justice. He is popularly known as the ‘Lion of Zimbabwe’ amongst his international fans because of his political influence.
He was instrumental in introducing the West to the traditional music of Zimbabwe through his involvement in the world music movement and still has had more international recognition for the sounds of has country than any other Zimbabwean to date.
Early Life
Early life
Chimurenga music legend Thomas Mapfuma (70) was born Michael Munhumumwe and ony started using his current name at the age of nine according to a biography of the icon by Banning Eyre .
MApfumo was born to Janet Chinhamo and Tapfumaneyi Mupariswa on the 2nd of July in 1945 but was raise by his maternal grandparent s Hamundindi and Kufera Munhumumwe who lived on a white farm in Marondera afta Mupariswa failed to pay lobola.
Mapfumo was Korekore Shona man from Guruve in the remote rugged valleys of Dande. An itinerant musician and a ‘one man band’ Tapfumaneyi made a scanty living driving tractors at farms in Mashonaland. Due to probable shame, Tapfumeyi disappeared from Janet’s life. Mapfumo saw him for the first time when he was 17 years old.
Mafumo’s mother married a car mechanic who lived in the surburb of Mabvuku in Harare. After they invited MApfumo to be part of their strict and churchgoing family , he travelled to the city using the indentification papers of one of Janet’s young brothers. The name on the papers was Thomas which was how Mapfumo, then Michael Munhumumwe became Thomas Mapfumo.
He has credited his step father for having funded his education ad teaching him good manners o work had and live well with other children. In his new family, Thomas lived with his four half siblings, two of which became members of the Chimurenga music star’s backing group –he Blacks Unlimited.
Career
Mapfumo began his career at the age of 16 when he moved to the capital, Harare which was called Salisbury) with a band called Cyclones.
When many black Zimbabweans were beginning to resist the white minority government, Mapfumo was also affecting a revolution in popular music by writing the lyrics to his songs in the language of the Shona people, who constitute the majority of black Zimbabweans, and by incorporating traditional melodies and rhythms into his music.
One of the key inspirations of Mapfumo’s work was the music of the mbira. Mapfumo and his guitarist worked together to duplicate on the electric guitar the sounds and rhythms of the mbira. The intensely complicated rhythms played on the drums were meant to represent the stamping of dancers’ feet.
In 1976 Mapfumo formed the Acid Band, which produced a blend of popular and traditional music as a vehicle to carry thinly veiled political messages; that music was called chimurenga (Shona: “struggle”). The band’s first album, released in 1977, was titled Hokoyo! (“Watch Out!”).
Seeing his music as a threat, the white minority banned his music form state-controlled radio stations. In late 1977, with the escalation of guerrilla warfare, security forces finally attempted to silence Mapfumo by imprisoning him for 90 days. When the country won independence, Mapfumo was considered to have played no small part in the achievement.
In 1978 he founded the band with which he would continue to perform (albeit with changes in personnel) into the early 21st century, the Blacks Unlimited. During the 1980s he added a real mbira to the band and continued to nurture and promote the traditional music of Zimbabwe.
Friction with the Government
Even after independence, Mapfumo’s music maintained a sociopolitical edge. As he lost faith in Pres. Robert Mugabe in the later 20th century, the government increasingly became the target of his criticism, and, following the release of Corruption (1989) with the Blacks Unlimited, Mapfumo and the members of his band were subject to harassment by the administration.
This political friction eventually led him in 2000 to move to the United States, where he settled in Orego although it was rumoured that he was deported. Mapfumo’s relocation did not diminish the potency of his recordings in his homeland, however; his 2005 album, Rise Up, like many of his earlier works, was banned from the state radio stations of Zimbabwe.
By the mid-1990s Mapfumo had become firmly established in the increasingly popular realm of world music and had garnered more international recognition for the sounds of his country than any other Zimbabwean musician to date.
