African Classics: Thomas Mapfumo

Album Review

Zimbabwe's Thomas Mapfumo started out with a fairly simple musical idea of taking traditional mbira tunes and updating them for electric guitars, bass, and drums, but the extraordinary times in which he did this, which just happened to be when the people of what was then called Rhodesia were engaged in a war to throw off the strictures of colonialism, made his songs, full of Shona folk sayings and proverbs, reverberate with powerful cultural insight, and Mapfumo played a tangible role through his music in the eventual creation of an independent Zimbabwe. He didn't rest on his laurels, though, and continued to comment through his music on the injustice, negligence, and political corruption he saw all around him in Zimbabwe, a cultural role that made him a figure of Bob Marley-like proportions in his homeland. Unfortunately, the new Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe proved to be no more tolerant than the previous colonial one of Mapfumo's spirited honesty, and he was forced to move his family to the U.S., where he continues to comment from exile on the affairs of his homeland. This set features several stirring pre-exile Mapfumo tracks, the bulk of which have not previously been available on CD outside of Africa. It's a fairly typical representation of the bright, positive but deeply political music he has always made, and his deft handling of folk sayings, and his full awareness of how these proverbs will be heard by different audiences, results in a music of subtle but tremendous emotional resonance. Oh, and you can dance to it, too.