Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Zimbabwe Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He put the mbira into a rock band, invented chimurenga music, and used it against two governments in succession — the second of which drove him into exile.
Thomas Tafirenyika Mapfumo grew up partly with his grandparents in rural Marondera, where he learned the mbira — the thumb piano at the centre of Shona religious practice, an instrument the missions had treated as heathen and which had no place in respectable popular music.
His innovation was to transcribe its interlocking patterns onto electric guitars and put them behind a band, and to sing in Shona rather than in English. The result is chimurenga music, named for the liberation struggle, and in the 1970s he used it exactly that way: songs whose surface was traditional and whose meaning was an instruction to join the fighters. The Rhodesian authorities banned the records and detained him without charge for three months in 1977, then tried to make him play a government rally, which he refused.
He was the sound of independence in 1980 and played at the celebrations. Within a few years he had turned the same instrument on the new government, singing about corruption, about the men who had got rich, and later about Robert Mugabe directly. Corruption, released in 1989, was the first; by the 2000s his records were banned from state radio and he was being followed.
He moved to Oregon in 2004 and did not perform in Zimbabwe again until 2018, after Mugabe fell. He has recorded for five decades and is, by broad agreement, the most important musician the country has produced.
His innovation was to transcribe its interlocking patterns onto electric guitars and put them behind a band, and to sing in Shona rather than in English. The result is chimurenga music, named for the liberation struggle, and in the 1970s he used it exactly that way: songs whose surface was traditional and whose meaning was an instruction to join the fighters. The Rhodesian authorities banned the records and detained him without charge for three months in 1977, then tried to make him play a government rally, which he refused.
He was the sound of independence in 1980 and played at the celebrations. Within a few years he had turned the same instrument on the new government, singing about corruption, about the men who had got rich, and later about Robert Mugabe directly. Corruption, released in 1989, was the first; by the 2000s his records were banned from state radio and he was being followed.
He moved to Oregon in 2004 and did not perform in Zimbabwe again until 2018, after Mugabe fell. He has recorded for five decades and is, by broad agreement, the most important musician the country has produced.
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