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style or grace.

Back in the village, we used to dance and listen to poetry through songs when the gwenyambira, our mbira players gathered together during ceremonies. Sometimes they would also play dandanda, the heavy drum, and mhito, the lead drum, and the third one to support it, rekutsinhira, playing the interlocking part. I could even play the gourd rattles filled with seeds, hosho.

Mbira was not just music. It was a communal means of communicating with the ancestral spirits. Mbira was also played to help bring rain during drought, stop rain when the Save River flooded for weeks, cure or chase away bad spirits, mashavi, and assist the traditional healer in his divination and healing practices. Alongside drums or without any drums, mbira was played at funerals, the installation of Chief Mutekedza and during rituals to quench the thirst of our ancestors, nyota yemadzitateguru.

Our singing was very much in harmony with the drum and hosho. Sometimes we danced to mbira just for entertainment and perfected our rhythms that way. I knew the rhythms well and even hoped that one day, the ancestors might choose me as a spirit medium, a real svikiro, and people around the village would regard me with awe and respect because I would have direct communication with the dead.

During Bira, the traditional religious ceremonies to praise and appease the spirits of our great ancestors, I danced among the elders until the spirit of Mbiru, the family great ancestor of the Vahera clan, possessed someone in the family.

Before the white man came, Mbiru had migrated from Chishanga way down in the south to Chiwashira, near present-day Chivhu. They said Chishanga was the original home of our people, the Vahera. Now Mbiru wanted recognition in the living. Only the long sounds of mbira played right through the night would invoke him and some of the more recently deceased to come out and speak to us.

One time Mbiru lived in my great aunt, Tete VaHwedemwe, who had married somewhere far, way out past Buhera. They said one day she became very ill when she was in her husband’s village. She could not move at all. The traditional healer was called and he said that Tete VaHwedemwe’s grandfather, Mbiru, wanted to possess her. Tete VaHwedemwe came and Mbiru the bull named after the great ancestor was killed.

There was an all-night bira. Before dawn, they played more mbira and started the song calling the people to make tracks back to Chishanga singing, “Hwirira Chishanga kwawakabva”. Tete slowly went into a trance and became possessed with Mbiru. She spoke to the elders like a man, giving them guidance and answering questions about troubling family matters.

My ability to dance to mbira was killed by Christian conversion in boarding school. The missionaries said mbira had a certain telephonic line to the ancestors, haunting and invoking the call to the spirit world that was so alien to the Christian world. Mbira belonged to primitive devil worship because it made people go into a trance and connect with dead ancestors.

That was abominable because those dead ancestors were not Christians. Talking to them in their spirit world would not take us to heaven. Mbira had to go.
During the liberation war for independence, the missionaries got help to ban mbira from colonial authorities. Anyone seen playing mbira during the war was quickly arrested and thrown in prison. Mbira was accused of providing zeal and ancestral courage to the freedom fighters.

At the mission school, there was no drum, no mbira, no hosho or anything that resembled traditional African musical instruments. Other Shona instruments like chipendani, chigufe or the hwamanda were not allowed either. In the Methodist Church we sang the soprano, alto, tenor and bass accompanied by the piano played by Miss Betty Davies.

She sat on a stool and led us through “Amazing Grace” and “Oh Lord My God, When I in awesome wonder, consider all the works thy hand has made . . .” And we all rose and sang along with her to the slow melody of the piano. We felt so close to heaven and Englishness. No stamping of feet or spirit possession. We gazed at the picture of Jesus and saw His suffering. We found solace in the comforting image of the cross. There it was, high up above the altar, releasing us from all the sins of our ancestors. Civilisation was soft, pure and orderly.

During Bible classes on Sunday night, Miss Davies selected four good girls to share spiritual messages and verses from the Bible in her house. Since I was the head girl, I was naturally chosen among the four best Methodist girls. Miss Davies lived alone and had never married because God wanted her to serve Him in Africa. She prayed that we continue to grow up as good Christian girls who did not dance to primitive music or participate in ancestor worship.

During prayers, we shared our village experiences, pointing out dangerous temptations that took us far from Christ. We asked for prayers to help us keep the light of Christ burning because back in the village, they played mbira and held ceremonies for ancestor worship.

Miss Davies said all that was evil and unchristian and we should refrain from such participation. After prayers and sharing, Miss Davies gave us tea with one biscuit each. While we nervously sipped the tea, Miss Davies played the piano for us. We listened and wanted to be so much like her so that one day, we will go to England and learn to play the piano and all the other European musical instruments.

During school holidays from the mission school, we went back home. Mbira could be heard resonating loud and clear during ceremonies. The elders danced and sang Nhemamusasa, the old mbira song. My cousin Piri, who did not go to boarding school, had even perfected her dancing rhythms to mbira, during my absence.

Later on, after boarding school, it was not fashionable to listen or to dance to mbira. So the sound of mbira gradually disappeared from my ears and my memory. 
Over the years, I saw mbira as an African piece of art, something that you buy, take back to Australia or America where I used to live and display somewhere visible for people to see and acknowledge my African heritage.

The mbira stayed on top of the bookshelf. Visitors picked and played with it, fingered the keys for a while then put it back at the bottom of the shelf.
Meanwhile, I longed to buy a piano and put it right in the corner of the dining room even though I never owned a house big enough to carry a grand piano. I could not play it, but I wanted it because a piano made a statement. It was an important measure of class, of my entry into Western lifestyle.

Many years later, here we were at the Book Café last Friday with my cousin Reuben visiting from Australia and Piri. Reuben wanted to enjoy music that was authentically African because back in Australia, there was nothing to remind him of the village rhythms. The mbira band, Mawungira eNharira, was playing. They were all barefoot, clad in cowhides, goat, leopard, zebra and buck skins wearing dreadlocks.

A couple of them looked almost trance-like with a meditative distant look. They were superb-looking men holding on to their electrified mbira placed inside deze, the calabash.

Soon as they started playing the song about returning back to our grandmothers, “Ndoendawo kwa Mbuya,” Piri stood up. She tied her wraparound cloth around her jean skirt more tightly. Without any hesitation, she went straight on to the dance floor. Reuben followed. The two of them danced in perfect rhythm like nothing has happened in between the village and here. I was not going to be out done. After all, I grew up with this mbira music.

I tried to follow the beat of the mbira. I leaned forward the way Piri did going forwards with her whole body and feet moving gracefully together. But my rhythm was unco-ordinated and almost spastic. Piri stopped dancing for a moment. She looked at me and said I danced like there were some planks of wood stuck around my back.

These were stopping me from getting into rhythm. I should go back to the village and get them removed, she said. “Mune mapuranga kumusana, Sis. Dzokerai kumusha abviswe.” Given that unsolicited consultant advice, I returned to my chair and quietly sipped my glass of wine.

When Piri came back, two middle-aged men, one of them in a suit, sitting at a table next to us, asked Piri to join them. She did. In no time at all they were buying her beer.
A few dances with one of them later, I saw her sharing snuff with them, the black tobacco ground powder (bute) used by spirit mediums. She held a little in the middle of her palm and pushed it through her nose the way Tete VaHwedemwe used to do.

In between sneezing and sniffing, she offered me some. I shook my head and said no, it was not attractive for a lady to do that. I was not going to push strange black stuff up my nostrils while sitting in half darkness. Piri ignored me and pushed more snuff up her nostrils. She dusted her nose and quickly wiggled her bottom on her way to the toilet.

Probably to sneeze some more. She was there for a while and when she returned, she went straight on to the dance floor. The man in a black suit joined her and the two of them danced like they were possessed. Reuben could not compete, nor could I. In between the songs, Piri poured some beer on her head to keep herself cool.

I watched Piri and the man in a suit dancing with superb rhythm in unison. I wondered how I was meant to relate with rhythm to the ancestors in a place surrounded by lights and beer in bottles.

I am among many Zimbabweans who abandoned mbira, the musical genre that defined our origins. In doing so, we lost our rhythms to Christianity or to other dance moves. It has taken some time, since Dumisani Maraire took mbira to the United States for it to be recognised. Now mbira is back on the rise. Chiwoniso Maraire, Stella Chiweshe, Mbira dzeNharira, Hope Masike, Albert Chimedza and many others are reviving the music and placing mbira on the national platform where it belongs.

Mbira was a sacred instrument central to Zimbabwean Shona culture. This instrument has been around for more than a thousand years. It is authentically Zimbabwean, beautiful and sophisticated. It is a historical genre of music the church did not want to recognise. The era when it was seen as demonic and primitive is gone. One day, mbira should be allowed into church because it is part of Shona culture. It is both sacred and secular, an important identity marker for Zimbabwean culture.

I can no longer effortlessly swing into the mbira rhythm the way I used to do. My bones are stiff to the beat. And yet, I can dance salsa, hip hop music and can even waltz with the best of them. But my mbira dance rhythm suffered a certain death. But I cannot let it die. During this dry season, we shall have ceremonies back in the village and mbira will be played all night. At dawn, I shall dance to mbira and awaken my rhythms to the ancestral sound of mbira.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is a writer and cultural critic. She holds a PhD in International Relations and works as a development consultant