Stella Rambisai Chiweshe, affectionately known in Zimbabwe as ’The Queen of Mbira’ or ‘Ambuya (grandmother) Chiweshe’, passed away on 20 January 2023.
The late Stella Chiweshe. Photo: Frans Schellekens/Redferns via Getty Images
Chiweshe was born in July 1946 in the rural area of Mhondoro in the Mashonaland province of northern Zimbabwe. She began playing the mbira, an ancient thumb piano, in the early 1960s. At the time she was reproached by both men and women because she had dared to play an instrument that was ordinarily played by men.
Chiweshe was not only a singer, songwriter and musician who performed extensively across Africa, Europe and the US. She was also a cultural activist, a pioneering woman and an educator. She founded the Chivanhu Centre in Zimbabwe, home to the preservation of traditional music and culture.
Chivanhu is a Shona word for humanity. One of her goals was to ensure that the mbira continued to be the heartbeat of Zimbabwe’s people. As the African adage goes: “When an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.” Her death is indeed a great loss to the country.
Pioneering force
The mbira, a powerful spiritual instrument used to communicate with the ancestors, was often played at traditional ceremonies by men. Historians trace its origins to 3 000 years ago on the west coast of Africa and to 1 300 years ago in the region that is now Zimbabwe. Chiweshe explained in an interview that: “Men played mbira, and for me to play mbira meant that I had to sit with men on either side of me. It made the women very uncomfortable.”
Not only did the young Chiweshe face criticism from her family and community. She also had to contend with a ban on the instrument by the British colonial administration because the idea of ancestral worship went against their Christian values.
Chiweshe was a rebel by nature. She defied the British and played at underground night ceremonies. She would go on to be a pioneering force in several other ways.
She took mbira music beyond Zimbabwe and did important work in popularising the art form.
She was able to help fight the stigmatisation of this spiritual musical instrument.
She championed, with great pride and reverence, the dominant Shona ethnic group’s tradition and folklore through her music, which evoked a deep spirituality and connection to the ancestors.
Finally, she blazed a trail for other women, especially musicians.
I explain in a book chapter in Victors, Victims and Villains: Women and Musical Arts in Zimbabwe that her performances combined mystery, presence and the use of traditional lyrics to challenge not just patriarchy but also colonial rule.
Her music, like that of other Zimbabwean musicians such as Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver Mtukudzi, was the soundtrack of the Second Chimurenga (the war of liberation against the white minority Rhodesian regime).
Female trailblazer
Although she did not openly call herself a feminist, as a female mbira custodian and practitioner she was one. British music writer Dominic Valvona explains: “Trumpeted in our modern virtue-labelling climate as a ‘feminist’, the outspoken star was certainly strong-willed, even a rebel. Making a name for herself overcoming the obstacles of tradition and a patriarchal-dominated society, her obstinacy soon garnered attention, not only in Zimbabwe but further afield.”
Chiweshe fought for recognition as a talented artist and gave voice to Zimbabwean womanhood, in all its complexity. By making her body visible and her voice heard, she defied musical and cultural rites deeply rooted in ancestral tradition. This defiance challenged the marginalisation of women which denies them autonomy and agency.
Chachimurenga (It’s Time for Revolution) is probably her most famous song. This timeless song is a call to arms. It refers to the liberation war against the Rhodesian regime and highlights the bloodshed and sacrifices made to liberate the country. The song, like most of her songs, features a fusion of mbira and other traditional instruments like marimba, drums and hosho (rattles).
Inspiring musician
Chiweshe inspired many young female mbira players, even though the mbira remains an instrument predominantly played by men. One of the notable musicians she inspired is the late, award-winning singer and mbira player Chiwoniso Maraire. Maraire emerged in the early 1990s and showed that the mbira could still evoke deeply spiritual emotions when combined with western musical instruments. Her songs resonated with people at all levels of society and offered messages of inspiration and hope as well as resistance.
Chiweshe also inspired Hope Masike, affectionately known as the ‘Princess of Mbira’, the contemporary custodian of this mystical instrument. Masike’s bold, urban fusion music shows that the mbira should not only be considered in its traditional role. She has coined the term ‘Gwenyambirakadzi’ to describe female mbira players. Popularising the mbira among young people, Masike has helped debunk the myth that the mbira is an instrument associated with the occult.
Queen of the mbira
Stella Chiweshe refused to bow down to oppression, discouragement or even threats to her musical aspirations. She used her music to comment on and highlight issues relating to tradition and contemporary socio-political and economic issues.
She entered a male-dominated domain and made her mark as one of the first women ever to play the mbira in public. And she showed considerable staying power. In a musical career spanning five decades, she enjoyed the spotlight as the queen of the mbira. Through her music, she cut across social limitations and geopolitics to emerge in a class of her own as spirited, talented and playful – yet always spiritually grounded in her traditional beliefs.
Gibson Ncube is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University. The article first appeared on The Conversation.
In what became a cult classic of musicology, Simon Reynolds’s Retromania describes a Western culture intent on self-cannibalism.
Exhausted by consumerism and technological acceleration, the book claims the West has become a Zeit without a Geist; where the recurrence of older styles has replaced the possibility of innovation. Ideals are defeated by pastiche and futures are stunted by late capitalism’s urge to reminisce.
But while Reynolds can level such a charge at the Global North, can the same be said for the Global South?
“In each cassette reel and crackled vinyl lies not only forgotten Palestinian melodies but the fractured lives of its listeners”
More specifically, can the same really be said about cultural production in Palestine, where to exist is to resist? And can the very things Reynolds labels as problematic – remixing, reissuing, resampling, and reproducing past trends – instead keep the memory of and hope for a Palestinian nation alive?
This is the intriguing story of the 1980s Palestinian folk group Al Fajer, retold by the Palestinian sonic archive, research journal and record label MaJazz Project.
Out of time and place
Mo’min Swaitat, the founder of MaJazz Project, cuts a unique figure among London’s record label owners.
Surrounded by a faceless haze of ‘world music’ aficionados and diggers, Mo’min’s MaJazz Project – a Palestinian-owned label releasing Palestinian music – is a welcome departure from the saviour types that own the repress market.
We all know them. Went backpacking in [insert exotic country here] only to fall in love with the music, returning home with a limited catalogue of the classics. And whilst it’s not our place to judge their motives, it raises concerns about the co-option of imported sounds to a wider, whiter audience.
One look at MaJazz’s releases instead reveals a discography dense with anecdotal histories, sourced by a child of the country with a stake in its future. Its first album reissue, Riad and Hanan Awwad’s The Intifada 1987 proves this identity case and point.
Produced one week after the First Intifada began in 1987 – the first album released after the outbreak of the uprising – The Intifada 1987 was a family effort; utilising keyboards and synthesisers then synonymous with funk to express a DIY initiative now natural to the Palestinian cause.
Despite distributing 3,000 cassettes of the album on the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City, the Israeli Army confiscated all the copies they could, with most continuing to remain in military archives today.
Had it not been for the fortuitous work of Mo’min and friends the cassette would have been lost. Mahmoud Darwish’s involvement as a co-writer on the album would have also been forgotten and with it a wondrously rhythmic example of Palestinian cross-pollination.
These instances of cross-pollination preserve the Palestinian experience post-Nakba and so inform the releases MaJazz Project puts out.
Whether field recordings of the Palestinian Black Panthers jamming in the mountains of Jenin or the label’s upcoming release – a compilation of Kuwait-based Palestinian folk group Al Fajer – MaJazz Project is not only tied to the separation of space and place but how music can provide a glimpse into shared Palestinian consciousness.
So as The New Arab sat down with MaJazz and Al Fajer, the idea that in each cassette reel and crackled vinyl lies not only forgotten Palestinian melodies but the fractured lives of its listeners seemed somewhat appropriate.
A rightful revolution
In an article essentially about the merits of old and new, it was fitting that The New Arab interviewed a 1980s folk band over Zoom.
Now in their 50s, the long-disbanded group were once the darlings of the Palestinian diaspora in Kuwait, with their regional success branching out to festival-packed performances across Europe and the Middle East. “Not bad for a bunch of amateurs,” laughed Jamil Sarraj, the group’s oud player.
Ironically, Al Fajer’s rejection of the then ‘trend’ contributed to their initial success.
At the time of the band’s peak, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a surge of accessible electronic instruments enter the Arab market.
For Al Fajer – Arabic for The Dawn – such sounds were to be avoided. Each band member cherished the soul of the oud and shebbabeh too much to be enticed by the digital wave, with Al Fajer member Dr Bashar Shammout commenting that “amid such chaotic circumstances, we wanted… and felt people needed… a calming classical influence.”
Jamil (left), Sima (centre) and Bashar (right) of Al Fajer performing at East Germany’s Festival of Political Songs, Berlin, 1989 [photo credit: Mahmoud Dabdoub]
The circumstances that Bashar alludes to were of course the First Intifada. Sparked by the Israel Army’s murder of four Palestinians in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp, the Intifada shook off the shackles that bound Palestinians and sparked a revolutionary mobilisation that would last six years, the ripples of which continue to be felt.
And much like the nida’ – or appeals – of political pamphlets distributed among the streets, musicians and artists alike would galvanise the public in their own way, as Edward Said wrote in Intifada and Independence, to create “a focused will”.
Whether Sliman Mansour’s artistic interpretation of sumud, Naji Al-Ali’s stirring caricatures or Al Fajer’s calming call to endure, each had to role to play.
“When we established the band during the First Intifada there were two streams of music in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora,” Bashar explained to The New Arab.
“On the one hand, you had the stuff authorised by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) which was ultra-nationalistic and in your face about revolution and resistance.
“On the other hand, you had bands like us and Sabreen who adopted a different mindset. Our thinking was ‘how can we get our message of a confident Palestinian identity across in a subtle, implicit way?’ You don’t need to be loud to distribute your message, you can avoid the Israeli authorities and stir the audience in your own way.”
One look at Palestinian music today and Al Fajer’s vision seems somewhat prophetic. With time, Palestinian music has evolved from sounding hyper-political to more mundane reflections of daily life. With it, more organic notions of nationhood have emerged.
The legacy then of Al Fajer lies not only in their talent but in the message they carry. Sima Kanaan, Al Fajer’s lead singer agreed: “That’s why I think re-issuing our album on MaJazz is so timely. We realised early on that the Palestinian struggle for liberation was also about a global struggle for human rights.
“Our struggle will always be about the land, but the Palestinian narrative today has increasingly shifted towards rights. It’s satisfying to know that our thirty-year-old message continues to resonate.”
A series of unfortunate events
Al Fajer’s perennial messaging and music would take them all over the world, playing to festival goers in their thousands. In particular, their involvement in East Berlin’s 1989 Festival of Political Songs drew special acclaim and is remembered fondly.
“You need to remember; we weren’t professional musicians. Our success was spontaneous. Yet here we were performing in Berlin…it was remarkable really,” said Jamil. “After we performed our song Halalalaya, the 5,000-strong audience shouted ‘Zugabe’ which we figured meant encore.”
Al Fajer’s folk frees us from a modern Palestinian history tainted by Israeli aggression whilst acting as an antidote for Palestinians living under day-to-day occupation”
Bashar also chimed in with an anecdote from the East German festival: “Backstage after our performance, the popular German musician Esther Béjarano came to greet us. She was known as one of the last survivors of Auschwitz and for her involvement in the Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz.
“She loved our performance so much she wanted us to sing together. We agreed but only if she sang in Arabic, so we sat there teaching her a transliteration of our lyrics. That festival and that performance was a special moment for us.”
For Palestinians today, Al Fajer epitomise a calming and confident expression of Palestinian identity [photo credit: Mahmoud Dabdoub]
However, as Palestinians are all too aware, moments of euphoria are often followed by periods of strife. “The fall of the Berlin wall changed everything. One day we were accepted as heroes, the next we were pariahs,” lamented Bashar, who now lectures on cultural heritage in Germany. “East Germany was sympathetic to our struggle and supported us [the Palestinians] with cultural and political funding. Since reunification, the policies of the German Government toward the Palestinians have become very antagonistic.”
Jamil continues. “Then Iraq invaded Kuwait. So in one year, we’d gone from playing festivals to being without a place we could call home.” The two events dealt a hammer blow to Al Fajer and the group disbanded soon after, with the band members now scattered around the world.
In reissuing Al Fajer’s work, MaJazz Project has not only given a new life to their music – dormant now for over 30 years, but to past conditions where Al Fajer’s music had been publicly celebrated.
As Bashar alluded to, Germany today treats Palestinians quite differently. Palestinian memorials and Nakba demonstrations are pre-emptively banned under the pretext of anti-Semitism, and visible symbols of Palestinian identity are routinely targeted. This has led to a consistently hostile environment for Palestinians and their allies.
Conversely, Al Fajer’s music gives us an insight into what Kuwait meant for Palestinians during the late 1980s. “It’s very important to mention that Kuwait was an oasis for the Palestinian resistance,” remarked Sima. “The heads of the PLO – including Arafat – used to live in Kuwait, and there were around 400,000 of us living there at the time. It’s important to link our music to this community, people were attached to our music because they were attached to the resistance. In other countries, Jordan for example, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Reissued and reunited
Listening to the album pre-release, it’s no surprise that Al Fajer continues to be flooded with messages. Jamil’s chords have a nostalgic feel that suspends the listener in his grasp, whilst Sima’s vocals both soothe and compel.
What Reynolds’s Retromania, therefore, failed to consider was the possibility that rather than being enslaved by the past, there are certain realities in which it sets you free. The tragedy of Palestine is one of them.
Al Fajer’s folk frees us from a modern Palestinian history tainted by Israeli aggression whilst acting as an antidote for Palestinians living under day-to-day occupation. And it is precisely this message of confident compassion that will scare the Israeli authorities the most. An amateur Palestinian group: a Professor, an HR expert, and a World Bank official has had a lasting positive impact on the national psyche.
Whilst Al Fajer indeed became a victim of their times, MaJazz has breathed new life, and optimism, into the group. “Palestinian music should be given another life,” said Mo’min. “But this time we release it on our terms. We no longer need to explain ourselves; our story is our story.”
Together, they are proof that music is an artform not primarily about social and political authority but a means by which a community can engage itself in a generous, non-coercive and attainable way. And as we’ve learnt from Al Fajer and MaJazz, it is then possible to turn victimhood into celebration.
Benjamin Ashraf is The New Arab’s Deputy Features Editor. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Jordan’s Center for Strategic Studies.
Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya explains why the revolutionary protest song, ‘Bella Ciao’ continues to play a role in global struggles today, and how it has served anti-government Gota Go Gama protests in Sri Lanka which forced the president to resign.
Earlier this summer, a video from the Sri Lankan ‘Gota Go Gama’ protests circulated online: the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa had finally resigned, and protestors were singing a Singhala version of ‘Bella Ciao’, the popular Italian song which was used in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement of the 1930s and 1940s. While the military violence and attacks on protestors in Sri Lanka continue, this was a clear moment of victorious celebration in the ongoing movement against the authoritarian regime.
The song – which details the singer’s awareness of their imminent death at the hands of the ‘invader’ and desire to die as a ‘partisan’ or freedom fighter – has been adapted by various anti-fascist movements globally prior to its use in the Gota Go Gama protests. In fact, the protests are part of a wider trend of anti-authoritarian resistance movements across South Asia in recent years, several of which have been characterised by new versions of ‘Bella Ciao’ in different languages.
”This cyclical, continual reproduction of ‘Bella Ciao’ across starkly contrasting yet uncannily similar contexts of protest is ultimately testament to the unifying power of protest music, as reproduced across time and space, in illuminating connections between struggles across decades, centuries and continents against a backdrop of evolving forms of capitalism.”
Certain features of the song have held throughout its reproduction across different contexts: its undeniable catchiness, and its clear theme of political resistance, despite drastic shifts in its lyrics. The song has even found its way beyond the realm of resistance movements into mainstream television, famously featuring in the hit Spanish crime drama Money Heist.
A Hindi adaptation of the song was released around the time of the mass protests against the fascistic Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, introduced in India in 2019. Broadly, the CAA aims to deny Indian citizenship to (Indian) Muslims; it is widely perceived as a step towards ethnic cleansing, indicating the current escalation of Modi’s Hindu supremacist regime into full-blown fascism.
Following the popularity of ‘Wapas Jao’, the songwriter, Poojan Sahil, subsequently penned a Punjabi version retaining the same melody with new lyrics, also entitled ‘Wapas Jao’ (‘Go Back’), for the large-scale Indian farmers’ movement protesting new anti-farmer legislation introduced by Modi’s government in 2020. These farm laws, which received global coverage and were largely retracted in Autumn 2021 following the year-long mass protests, were set to adversely affect poor farmers, and are widely seen to represent the ongoing corporate takeover of agriculture in India.
Both versions of ‘Wapas Jao’ have a similar theme lyrically to ‘Bella Ciao’ – although, as Sahil clarified, the songs are not translations. The Hindi version alludes to the fascism of the Indian government through the repeated line ‘go away, o you tyrant’, explicitly locating the singer within the resistance movement, and the song as an unmistakably anti-fascist anthem.
‘Wapas Jao’ (across both versions) also moves away from the somewhat personal lyrics of ‘Bella Ciao’, which uses the singular pronoun ‘I’ throughout (in contrast to ‘we’ in ‘Wapas Jao’) and captures the fear invoked by the rise of fascism through the line ‘I feel death approaching’. By contrast, the lyrics of the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’ discuss the movement against the Indian government and the major companies which are profiting from the farm laws. Both versions of ‘Wapas Jao’ are thus references to the context of the original song which take its anti-fascist commentary a step further, situating themselves within a specific anti-fascist protest movement.
By pairing the original melody with a sparse acoustic guitar, these versions both highlight the timeless catchiness of ‘Bella Ciao’ as well as showing its versatility in lending itself to diverse musical styles – and languages – of different eras and locations. The case of ‘Bella Ciao’/ ‘Wapas Jao’ illustrates Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that reproduction allows the work of art ‘to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in’, and thereby ‘actualises what is reproduced’.
Interestingly, the anti-fascist or partisan ‘Bella Ciao’ is not, in fact, the original version -despite being the best-known – but is adapted from the ‘mondine’ version, which originated as a folk song sung by mainly women paddy workers (mondine) in Northern Italy in the late 19th century in protest against harsh working conditions. This agrarian context is evoked – intentionally on Sahil’s part – by the Punjabi version of ‘Wapas Jao’ centred on the farmers’ movement, which includes the lyrics ‘each grain of soil sings in chorus’.
Taking on the tyrant
Whilst the anti-fascist version of ‘Bella Ciao’ focused on resistance against ‘the invader’ as opposed to ‘the boss’ of the original version, the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’ evokes a new kind of invader – or ‘tyrant’ – the Indian government and the companies taking over Indian agriculture, which are being urged to ‘go back’ by agricultural workers. This version recalls the voice and perspective of the original song, in a new political, geographical, and temporal context.
Indeed, this evoking of the original version also underlines the concentration of agricultural workers in the Global South and their relative decline in the Global North during the 20th century.
Having originally been centred on workers’ experiences, and subsequently been reproduced and adapted in various contexts of anti-fascism, ‘Bella Ciao’ is once again being used to shed light on (agricultural) workers’ struggles through the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’.
Through both versions, meanwhile, Sahil arguably utilises the fame of ‘Bella Ciao’ as an anthem of resistance against the widely-known rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, referencing the song through reproduction as a way to emphasise the gravity of the current situation in India through implicit comparison.
This cyclical, continual reproduction of ‘Bella Ciao’ across starkly contrasting yet uncannily similar contexts of protest is ultimately testament to the unifying power of protest music, as reproduced across time and space, in illuminating connections between struggles across decades, centuries and continents against a backdrop of evolving forms of capitalism.
The Gota Go Gama protestors singing ‘Bella Ciao’ sends an affirmingly hopeful message – that the movement recognises itself as situated within a history of people’s struggles all sharing the same determination for change, from the anti-fascists in Italy to the farmers in India and everything in between and beyond.
Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya is a writer, activist and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine, interested in arts and culture and social movements.
