Extracts Maputo Fusion / A Howl of Delight / Indians vs. Africans Thoughts behind Ibo Ibo was conceived when I first heard Chamunorwa, by Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited. If you’ve never heard this record, then hunt it down without delay. To this day, it remains the best album I know [1]. The cover shows Mapfumo - the ‘Lion of Zimbabwe’ - in grainy black and white, with a woolly hat perched on his torrent of dreadlocks. He is superimposed on a yellow background, and is grinning towards the black, red, yellow and green stripes of the Zimbabwean flag. Chamunorwa was released in 1989 - nine years after this former British colony gained its independence – and although, at the time, the tide of popular opinion was already turning against the shamelessly corrupt regime of Robert Mugabe, the defiance and optimism of both the cover and its contents belong firmly to the independence era. Thomas Mapfumo is the co-inventor and chief exponent of chimurenga music: a style born in the 1970s war of independence (or Chimurenga), which transposed the traditional music of the Shona tribe onto electric instruments - using lead and bass guitars to mimic the interweaving patterns of the mbira (thumb piano) and drum kits to play the mesmerising rhythms of hand drums and hosho hand-rattles. Over the years, his sound has been through many incarnations. On albums like Gwindingwi Rine Shumba, the band is stripped right back to guitar, bass and drums, while on Chimurenga For Justice he embraces everything from reggae to keyboards, English lyrics to walls of echoing brass. But Mapfumo’s essential mission has always been to protect Shona tradition. He has consistently decried foreign influence on his ancestral culture - variously blaming such problems as alcoholism, AIDS and political corruption on both the colonial legacy and his country’s fascination with the West - and it was in this spirit that he came to make Chamunorwa. Here, for the first time, he brought three actual mbira players into the line-up. The horns steam, the guitars dance and the backing singers wail, but at their heart are the hypnotic cycles of a more ancient Africa. On Chamunorwa, more than anywhere else, Mapfumo sounds like a mystic, a witch doctor, a being so rootsy that he might just have emerged from the ground. Ten months after I first sat Chamunorwa on my record player, I was living in a suburb of Harare, working for an organisation that promoted traditional Zimbabwean music and writing promotional material for the country’s other great star, Oliver Mtukudzi. The year was 1997 - two years before the government’s disastrous confiscation of the white-owned farms, and the consequent collapse of the economy - and the nightlife of Harare still boasted much the same vibrancy for which it had become famous back in the 1980s. On any given evening, Simon ‘Chopper’ Chimbetu would be playing a five-hour set to the off-duty thieves and prostitutes in Club Matute, or the Hohodza Marimba Band would be stirring up the suits in the more salubrious surroundings of Club Hideout 99. But the unfortunate truth was that Zimbabwe was on the slide. During the first few weeks of 1998, the dollar more than halved in value and, shortly afterwards, a series of riots tore through Harare and its satellite city, Chitungwiza. People were protesting against inflation, soaring taxes and 25% hikes in food prices, but the government’s response was to send in troops, tear gas and helicopters, and soon the protests dissolved into looting. Among the running battles and burning shops, a total of nine people were shot dead by the police, and when our organisation’s office was destroyed - together with four months’ work - I decided it was time for a decision. Zimbabwe in the late 1990s was a country of fear and looming catastrophe. Thomas Mapfumo himself may have been playing most nights, but in no way was this the place that I had heard on Chamunorwa, and I began to make inquiries among my friends about somewhere truly African: somewhere I might visit where tradition had prevailed and Western influence – the horrors and confusions of the 20th century - had somehow failed to penetrate. This, then, is how I came to leave Harare one morning in February, 1998, and to set out for Ibo: an island off the northern coast of Mozambique, which, so a friend named Abigail had informed me, was lost in a labyrinth of mudflats and mangrove swamps - all but forgotten by the mainland. The fact that Mozambique was the poorest country in the world, having emerged only five years earlier from a seventeen-year civil war, that this was the rainy season and I spoke neither Portuguese nor any other Mozambican language didn’t occur to me. It didn’t even strike me until I returned to Zimbabwe and Mozambique seven years later - to revise the Rough Guide to World Music - that to look for somewhere ‘truly’ African might be considered not merely ignorant but actively offensive. All I had in mind was a dream born of the six short songs of Chamunorwa: the dream of a pre-colonial paradise. [1] the original Gramma recording, not the Mango reissue, which suffered the world’s least-needed remix…