Introduction

Sekuru’s Stories is a digital monograph featuring the music, stories, and life history of Tute Chigamba, a renowned Zimbabwean musician. Born in 1939 in the rural district of Guruve, Chigamba is now referred to by family, friends, and students alike using the honorific title Sekuru, or “Grandfather.” Sekuru Chigamba’s life traces the arc of twentieth-century Zimbabwean history, from a childhood spent moving between his natal village and the nearby white-owned commercial farms where his father worked to his experience of labor migration as young man during the 1950s, and from the perils of the Zimbabwean liberation war to the cosmopolitan connections he developed following independence.

The subject matter of Sekuru Chigamba’s stories – from his ancestor Dumbu’s defeat of a four-eyed man named Nyamazunzu to his own dreams of journeying to the Congo to become a rhumba guitarist – is by turns surprising, funny, suspenseful, and often poignant. In the story “Charama Eats His Beard,”  Sekuru Chigamba narrates his grandfather Charama’s arrest by the British South African Police in the late 19th century. At the time, Charama was living in the bush with two of his brothers, Chipungu and Sasa. Upon detaining the brothers, the British challenged Sasa, who served as a medium for a senior clan spirit, to prove his legitimacy by making rain fall within the hour. Positioned beneath the hot sun, the brothers began to sing, “Little cloud, circle around, full of rain, circle around.” Soon, a small cloud appeared in the sky. After the ensuing downpour lasted a day and a half, the British recognized the medium’s power and begged him to halt the deluge.

Mbira Dzavadzimu – The Mbira of the Ancestors

Sekuru Chigamba’s stories also introduce readers to the diverse world of Zimbabwean musical practice. Sekuru Chigamba’s primary instrument is the mbira dzavadzimu, or mbira of the ancestral spirits.  Played during all-night ceremonies called mapira, the mbira is instrumental in summoning the ancestral spirits to possess living mediums, known as masvikiro. Once the spirits have arrived, mbira players often shift to a softer, slower style of playing in order to accompany consultations between the ancestors and their living descendants.

Sekuru Chigamba grew up immersed in this ritual world as his father, named Chigamba Tavasika, served as an interpreter for a senior clan spirit, or mhondoro. Yet his father also worked as a cook on a succession of commercial farms owned by white Rhodesian settlers, giving the young Chigamba an intimate view of everyday colonial entanglements. Echoing one of the world’s most recurring twentieth-century narratives, Chigamba migrated to the colonial capital in 1962, where he gained employment in a shop owned by a Jewish refugee who had fled the Holocaust. Even as an urban resident, however, Sekuru Chigamba continued attending ceremonies, and he began teaching himself to play the mbira dzavadzimu in 1965. Since this time, he has become one of the world’s foremost mbira performers, instrument makers, and composers, and has toured widely in Europe, North America, and Asia.

In recent decades, the mbira dzavadzimu has emerged as Zimbabwe’s most iconic musical tradition, granting Sekuru Chigamba’s stories significance for a wide community of musicians, students, and scholars. Because Sekuru Chigamba actively composes new songs for the mbira, for example, his stories point toward innovation within a musical tradition often described as inherently conservative in its orientation toward the past. As an expert mbira maker, or mhizha, Sekuru Chigamba offers detailed analyses of the instrument’s physical properties, tuning, and sound. From his position as an accomplished mbira player, or gwenyambira, he portrays the mbira’s social identity as shifting and complex, with particular intersections between gender, masculinity, and social class. Joining depth with breadth, Sekuru Chigamba’s active engagement in various other musical practices, from acoustic guitar playing to endangered Zimbabwean musical bows such as the mukube and chipendani, offers a broad overview of 20th century Zimbabwean musical life.

Navigating Sekuru’s Stories

As a digital monograph, this project is organized into five sections, conceived as roughly akin to chapters. In the first, Sekuru Chigamba relates stories from his early years in Guruve, beginning with his birth in 1939 and ending with his departure as a migrant laborer in 1957. In the second, he recounts stories about his life in the urban capital, from his attendance at ceremonies in the early 1960s to his family’s experiences of extreme hardship in the late 1970s. The third section extends Sekuru Chigamba’s life history from the pivotal moment of Zimbabwean independence through his emergence as an international touring artist in the 1990s. In the fourth section, Sekuru Chigamba offers a detailed account of his primary instrument, the mbira dzavadzimu, exploring topics such as the mbira’s origins, the law of mbira, and the social role of the mbira player, or gwenyambira. In the final part of the site, Sekuru Chigamba recounts an extended oral history of the Shona people and their neighbors.

Reflecting the multivalent nature of Sekuru Chigamba’s oral narratives, this digital project is designed to encourage various modes of engagement. On the one hand, Sekuru’s Stories is designed as a digital monograph, with a structure that presents sections roughly akin to chapters, encouraging readers to page through the site’s contents. Organized largely in chronological order, the first three sections – Early Years, Musical Life, and Independence – chart the trajectory of Sekuru’s Chigamba’s life. The following sections – Mbira and Ancestors –  present Sekuru’s specialized knowledge of Zimbabwean music and history. Within each is a series of vignettes that may be read either sequentially or separately.

At the same time, the Explore section offers several non-linear paths through the site, inviting viewers to engage with an image gallery, musical archive, and interactive map. In this way, Sekuru’s Stories is intended to be both accessible for general audiences, and engaging for specialists within a variety of disciplines. Special features include a 3-D viewer of one of Sekuru Chigamba’s oldest instruments, a database with Sekuru Chigamba’s explanation of the meaning behind many mbira songs, online audio streaming through a SoundCloud playlist, free digital audio downloads through Bandcamp, an interactive family tree and timeline, and individual pages describing several indigenous Zimbabwean instruments.

Sekuru’s Stories is also designed to appeal to Shona speaking readers, as well as readers with an interest in learning the Shona language. Many of Sekuru Chigamba’s stories are available in both Shona and English versions, with a button enabling viewers to easily move between the two languages.

About co-author Jennifer Kyker

Sekuru’s Stories is co-authored by Sekuru Chigamba and Jennifer Kyker. Currently Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music and the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, Jennifer began studying with Sekuru Chigamba as a fifteen year-old, while living in Zimbabwe to learn mbira in 1995.

In 2016, Jennifer published Oliver Mtukudzi: Living Tuku Music in Zimbabwe, an ethnography of popular music, politics, and audience reception in post-colonial Zimbabwe released through Indiana University Press. She has also published articles on topics such as listening and reception, music and gender, HIV/AIDS, and Zimbabwean musical bows in a number of journals, including Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, African Music, and the American Journal of Public Health. In addition to her current ACLS Fellowship, Jennifer has also received both Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays Fellowships. In 2003, she co-founded the non-profit organization Tariro, which educates girls in Zimbabwean communities affected by poverty and HIV/AIDS.