MARKO PHIRI

The exile of creatives and other thinkers – radical or otherwise – has since the coming of independence in Africa been part of a complex tapestry that has come to define and capture the spirit of the fight for the right to think. It certainly looks like it has always been like that, an unintelligent design if you will, for Africa’s tortured immediate post-independence intellectuals will attest to the angry anti-intellectualism embraced by their tormentors.

As soon as the founding fathers took over from what others like to call “minority settler regimes,” there was no reason to tolerate the views of compatriots who disagreed with Kamuzu, Sese Seko, Mugabe and other strongmen from that stock. Fast forward to latter-day exiles who took to the hills as Africa’s democracy project floundered under increasing international and domestic scrutiny.

For musicians especially, and in Zimbabwe in particular, Thomas Mapfumo stands as the lodestar of early 21 century exiles who fled under a cloud of political persecution, and his story has been told and retold. However, south-west of Zimbabwe, another exile emerged right about the same time Mapfumo fled his homeland, albeit for different reasons.

When the much celebrated Lovemore Majaivana decided to show the country of his birth his back, it was not because he was fleeing political persecution. Majaivana’s own commentary through song could well match Mapfumo’s politically charged dithyrambs, for it was Majaivana whose lyrics would be a call to arms of sorts for people in the historically marginalised region of Matebeleland.

His music became or provided a rallying call for any agitator where the politics of language remain writ large, from supporters of the city’s biggest football club, Highlanders, to secessionists poking Mugabe’s nose about self-rule as the Mthwakazi nation. Yet Majaivana would swear he was not a “protest” anything.

His decision to leave the country as the millennium turned is captured in his own words where he says in one documentary that his passion for song and dance died because he realised he was not making a living out of his music. Happy feet and empty pockets, Majaivana could not take it anymore.

He complained that artists singing in the majority Shona language were better off as they were receiving fat royalty cheques, testimony to the financial support of their fans. And this was long before streaming interrupted how music is consumed and how musicians make money.

The logic was simple really: if “his” people loved his music so much, why is it that it didn’t show in Majaivana’s improved bank account?

After all, he did say that in the early 1980s, his classic Istimela Segoli was such a commercial success he was able to buy himself a house, something latter-day musicians can only dream of. So what changed in the intervening years?

The personal is political and, and for Majaivana, it certainly got very personal and political. It was a gripe that would be heard more than two decades after Majaivana folded his tent, took his things and left, so that a young hip hop prodigy by the name Cal Vin (now deceased) would lament that if only he was Shona he would have been rich from his music.

He was the type of fellow who was gifted and knew it, yet despite bagging national hip hop awards, he still stayed in his mother’s house in Bulawayo the second city, unable to afford what Majaivana had achieved more than a generation earlier.

With the explosion of Zimdancehall, a young chanter whose rhythms had been played at ruling party rallies, threatened to quit his art a few years ago because, as he put it: “people love my music but look at me, I’m still riding commuter omnibuses. I can’t afford a car like South African musicians.” Those listening laughed. And the young man is based in Harare, the putative citadel of the entertainment industry’s glamour and glare.

Majaivana did relocate to Harare in the 1990s, pressured by financial circumstances to coin it in the capital city’s pub and private gig circuit. But like any exile in the making, relocating to another city did not provide any comfort. His feet kept itching. He didn’t last.

Yet a bigger story is to be told regarding how musicians from other parts of the country have struggled to make a living off their creative juices. Even after Majaivana, younger musicians from Bulawayo would abandon the city long considered a cultural industries creative cauldron and head for the capital seeking small fortunes.

Some were disappointed and disappeared into obscurity. Some stayed and made the mother city their second home. Yet it is telling that Majaivana seems to have set the tone, realising that if he was to earn a living, he would have to literally follow the money. If the mountain would not come to Majaivana, Majaivana would have to go to the mountain.

A female jazz artist did say many years ago that relocating to Harare made business sense to her because that is where embassies were located, letting us in on the fact that embassies regularly held cocktail events and hired musicians to entertain the diplomatic corps at a premium. If musicians had expected to make a killing out of record sales, well they were in for a heartbreak. The money was in private gigs, so it was explained to make sense of the decision to move to the capital.

It was also explained that major corporations were also based in Harare, – remembering the mass shutdown of Bulawayo companies – and these corporates, like the embassies, held occasional if not regular cocktail events and routinely hired musicians for entertainment. And the music was not the riotous type, but that which was designed for the mature suit-and-tie crowd. And that invariably meant laid back, vapid jazzy numbers that would have suited executives and diplomats.

In an earlier time, portentous if you may, Majaivana had met with Mapfumo in the capital city, exchanging notes on the technical aspects of assembling a band, with Majaivana later saying Mapfumo would pinch his ear about live instrumentation and the amalgamation of sounds, and everything else that gave heft to live performances. If their paths ever crossed again in their respective exiles in the past two decades, one has to imagine what would preoccupy that reminiscence.

While Majaivana’s frustration with the country would appear meta-local, based on his inability to make a living as a Ndebele musician from the country’s south-west, that itself was overtly political as the region from whence he came had long been on the backfoot of government’s development agenda. We have recently heard from Jeys Marabini, some would say a pretender to Majaivana’s throne, saying that he has been persuaded to move from his Bulawayo base to the capital – again with the promise of easy pickings – but says he has resisted the allure for personal reasons.

From his lamentations as early as the 1980s long before Zanu PF made the self-destruct economic detour, Majaivana was very much awake to the zeitgeist, a time when Mugabe’s star began to dim, when his erstwhile bush comrades were already getting tired of him barely a decade into independence.

Little did they know he would have his iron claws on the levers of power for thirty-seven years. It is no wonder then that Majaivana has been standard fare of academe from the Matebeleland region, with tons of scholarly writings placing him at the centre of the Mthwakazi self-rule disaffection.

Majaivana’s exile has been in many ways as bitter as Mapfumo’s, yet because he would reincarnate in the United States as a preacher – he after all is his father’s son, with his Malawian-born dad having been a preacher – he would likely tell you that bitterness is not part of his calling. And he has not shied away from telling anyone concerned to leave him alone.

Years ago a group of well-meaning young well-heeled admirers (themselves exiled by Mugabe’s economic kamikaze) reached out to Majaivana seeking to honour him, recognising his contribution to the Matebeleland region. For indeed it would be pretty strange for any native of the region to claim they have never heard of Lovemore Majaivana.

These young men were obviously from that stock that believes in giving their heroes their flowers while those heroes are still alive. Majaivana’s response was curt: leave me alone. I’m done with that past.

When Mapfumo held a well attended home-coming show in Harare, nostalgia got the better of Bulawayo fans who did not waste time calling on Majaivana to hold his own homecoming extravaganza in the second city. But not one to hold his tongue, the late Cont Mhlanga – himself a cultural institution – didn’t mince his words, advising Majaivana to stay away from Bulawayo and therefore Zimbabwe as far as he could.

Mhlanga’s reasons: the same fans clamoring for Majaivana’s return had frustrated him into exile as they never supported him by attending his shows. Now as Mapfumo rests his microphone after a long and fulfilling career with its attendant highs and lows, and away from his motherland, it is worth reflecting on the cards that post-independence Zimbabwe has dealt these icons.