Hope Masike's Mbira Mberi: a reflection by Ignatius Mabasa

Ignatius Mabasa’s foreword to Mbira Mberi, a new book by Hope Masike, published by Tribe Hope Foundation, Harare, 2026

Reading Hope Masike’s new book, Mbira Mberi, brings various enriching feelings. As someone who had the privilege of knowing and relating with mbira luminaries such as Ephat Mujuru, Dumisani Maraire and Chiwoniso Maraire, I am thrilled beyond words that Hope Masike has finally done what I long challenged many of my artist friends to do: write your own stories!

Partly memoir, academic and mbira playing handbook… Mbira Mberi is not merely an act of documentation, but an act of cultural reclamation, an opportunity to reflect on the beauty of the mbira and to articulate its meaning from within, as a cultural insider.

Over the years, I have consistently urged fellow cultural practitioners and intellectuals—among them Cont Mhlanga, Chenjerai Hove, and George Kahari  to tell our own stories. I have argued for a mode of writing that blends the personal and the academic, not only as a contribution to our cultural heritage but also as a necessary decolonising practice. In this regard, Masike’s work stands as both response and example!

One of the strengths of Mbira Mberi lies in its engagement with earlier scholarship, particularly that of Western ethnomusicologists such as Hugh Tracey. While acknowledging the usefulness of such work, Masike does not shy away from pointing out its limitations, including its often patronising gaze. Her critique is both measured and necessary, opening up space for more grounded, self-representational scholarship.

Masike poignantly reflects on the irony that, in writing about the mbira, she has often had to rely on the work of cultural outsiders, largely because many of our own mbira masters have either felt intimidated by writing or have not prioritised it. In doing so, she implicitly challenges other living mbira artists to reject the lingering colonial assertion, attributed to a former Native Commissioner, that “the native does not write.” This book, therefore, is not only a narrative, it is a call to action.

The text is both informative and accessible, demystifying complex musical concepts while guiding the reader through the journey of learning to play the mbira. Masike’s storytelling is marked by wisdom and humour, and she generously offers practical insights for aspiring players. Her advice that one should not be tempted by a cheap mbira, but rather seek an instrument that “chooses you,” captures the deeply relational nature of this musical tradition.

Importantly, the book balances historical and cultural reflection with contemporary realities. Here is a book about Hope Masike’s life in music with iconic photographs. Masike observes how mbira practice continues to evolve, with modern players incorporating innovations such as instrument strands, branded cases, and digital tuning applications. In doing so, she resists the temptation to freeze the mbira in an imagined past, instead presenting it as a living, adaptive tradition.

Her observation that more work needs to be done to historicise the mbira outside colonial frameworks, is particularly compelling. One cannot help but reflect that such efforts should have been undertaken as national projects in the early years of Zimbabwe’s independence, when many knowledge holders were still alive. That this work is being done now, decades later, is both commendable and sobering. It speaks to the gaps in our cultural institutions and the urgent need to invest in the documentation and celebration of our own narratives.

While the book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on music and band management, it also opens up important avenues for further exploration. At times, one wishes Masike had allowed herself more space to delve deeper into more issues, or to offer a fuller account of her own personal journey. There is, perhaps, room in the future for a more expansive biographical work that would further cement her place within Zimbabwe’s cultural archive.

Nonetheless, what Masike has achieved here is no small feat. Even where the focus leans toward specific traditions such as Nyunga Nyunga, the work challenges other artists and researchers to document and reflect on their own practices.

A defining feature of Masike’s artistic journey, as reflected in this book, is her courage to experiment and hybridise. I am reminded of the legacy of Dumisani Maraire, whose students have explored bold musical fusions, blending Shona classics such as Nhemamusasa and Dangurangu with compositions by Western classical figures like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. In a similar spirit, Masike’s adaptation of Shona church hymns onto the mbira demonstrates both innovation and resilience. As she notes, such experimentation has attracted criticism from multiple fronts, yet it is precisely in these contested spaces that new creative possibilities emerge.

This book is, ultimately, an important and timely contribution. It affirms the mbira not only as a musical instrument, but as a repository of knowledge, identity, and cultural continuity. More importantly, it signals a shift towards African artists writing themselves into history, on their own terms.

Ignatius T. Mabasa, 2026

+we reproduce this foreword to Mbira Mberi with the kind permission of both Ignatius Mabasa and Hope Masike. For orders: +263 779 626881/hope.masike@gmail.com 

Andrew Chatora becomes a publisher!

 

Prolific Zimbabwean novelist, Andrew Chatora, has established a publishing company at his UK base and is looking for new manuscripts from new and established authors.

The specific focus is fiction and memoir.

Called ‘Friesian Publishing’, the newly minted independent literary imprint based in London, derives its name from the Friesian horse. Long associated with strength, the Friesian horse is also a symbol of elegance and endurance. The emblem reflects the press’s editorial philosophy which is stated as “a commitment to publishing books of substance that can stand the test of time while remaining attentive to the moral and imaginative concerns of the present.”

Speaking from London, Chatora, the author of Diaspora Dreams says, “Friesian Publishing was founded with the aim of publishing books that endure beyond the immediate moment.” He adds that they are seeking work that engages thoughtfully with questions of identity, history, migration, power and belonging without reducing literature to labels or limiting it to prescribed categories. "As our remit is broad, we seek to avoid rigid categorisation."

Their open call for new work appears clearly aggressive, as the imprint has simultaneously announced its first forthcoming title, Unstoppable March of the Human Condition: Essays on Politics and Literature, a nonfiction essay collection by Andrew Chatora himself.

The collection brings together a series of essays that explore how literary culture intersects with questions of power, historical memory and the evolving moral imagination of the modern world. This brings to mind Ngugi’s words in support for his writing of Homecoming: “In a novel, the writer is totally immersed in a world of imagination… At his most intense and creative, the writer is transfigured, he is possessed…(but) in the essay, the writer can be more direct, didactic, polemical, or can merely state his beliefs and faith…to define his beliefs, attitudes and outlook in the more argumentative form of the essay.”

Essays such as Andrew Chatora’s enable authors to act as public intellectuals to address issues in real-time, sometimes offering more credible, direct insights than the mainstream media.

This route has been taken by many other great writers of fiction; Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chenjerai Hove and more recently, Tsitsi Dangarembga.

In Chatora's debut essay collection, the legitimate role of the contemporary writer is uppermost. These essays offer a unique reading experience, appreciating great writers like Charles Mungoshi, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Yvonne Vera, Ayi kwei Armah and many other luminaries who have influenced the author’s own writing journey and consciousness over the years. Wide-ranging in scope, the essays span literature, history, politics, exile, language, and identity. 

Chatora  reflects on the condition of exile and the function of literature. Celebrated literary critic, writer and poet, Onai Mushava, makes insightful guest contributions to the collection.

Andrew Chatora is the author of four published fictional books and has developed a reputation as an important fiery voice within Afro diasporic literary discourse. His editorial stewardship is expected to shape the imprint’s transnational outlook, particularly its engagement with writing emerging from African and diaspora contexts.

Writers wishing to submit manuscripts to Friesian Publishing may do so via email:

submissions@friesianpublishing.com. Full submission guidelines and further information about the imprint can be found at:

https://www.friesianpublishing.com

 

 

 

Golden Guvamatanga's debut poetry collection!

 

A book review

Title: Let the Children Make a Wish,

Published in Harare by Underclass Books & Films ISBN: 978-1-77933-034-5, 160 pages, 2026.

Author: Golden Guvamatanga

 

(Reviewed by Memory Chirere)

In Let the Children Make a Wish, Golden Guvamatanga’s poems in English operate in the spirit of Blues music. The Blues are endowed with an inexhaustible energy that veils and relieves suffering.

Veteran journalist, Golden Guvamatanga’s debut poetry collection, is clearly inspired and anchored on Zimbabwe’s November 2017’s ‘Operation Restore Legacy’ movement. His poems appear to be about finding what the nation promises itself and if it really delivers. What is right and what is wrong for and about Zimbabwe?

The poet constantly wonders if April 1980 and November 2017, the two cataclysmic dates in the history of Zimbabwe, are each other’s twin shadows. What was won or lost through those two dates?  Sometimes the poet thinks that they are each other’s sparring partners. Could he be thinking, too, that they are both about running on the same spot in a dark summer night? Guvamatanga touches on the euphoric promises of 1980 and 2017, and the subsequent challenges of how exactly we can make history grant the children their real wish.

If the children were to draw Nehanda on the township wall, would they make her fly like an angel? Why? Why not?

Here, as in Blues music, is an expression of the resilience and tragedy of the people. In an overriding avuncular tone, the title poem talks about the need to let the children make a final determination about their heritage. But the children can only make that wish “only if their fate lies blissfully in their obliging hands and when their destiny is poised for their expectant, loving palms.” But do Guvamatanga’s children know who they are and what they want? Who is eating the children’s cookie?

In these ghetto-centric poems, written by a poet who grew up long after the guns of liberation went silent, we are linked to issues that refuse to die in Zimbabwe. This is often called the Zimbabwean question which is “the recurrent economic, social and political crises” from colonial conquest in 1896, up to the present. As you read these poems, you feel that Zimbabwe is a nation of unresolved conflict of over a century. Guvamatanga writes, in one of these poems:

“The old does not give in easily to the incoming new.

There is always a drift towards war when a new power

threatens

To dislodge the hegemonic control of an existing

one from the levers of power.

But this new carry promises of prosperity.

 It comes scarred by hostile tirades from the old.”

 

This is a question once raised elsewhere by another Zimbabwean poet, Tanaka Chidora. As stated by Franz Fanon elsewhere, the new and the old are failing to have a clean break because, maybe, the seeds are not exactly new. The deliberately irregular lines of these poems point at our wobbly cartwheels on which we ride in our ever-challenging quest for an anchor. The poet, however, suggests that although we are not yet there, we are the right people who must try to get there! That is the most redeeming thrust of this collection. Ties with the ancestors are created and Guvamatanga is suggesting, like Amilcar Cabral, that we can reclaim our upward thrust in history.  

For Cabral, reclaiming the "upward thrust in history" meant that national liberation was not just a political act of gaining independence, but a return to the source of a people's own culture and history, which had been interrupted and suppressed by colonial domination. In these poems the prophet keeps saying that there are many things that need correction. The ancestors keep saying that:

“Only yesterday I was like you boy

I was there too when the world craved for light

But darkness found me moseying wildly in its sight.

Just desist from following that lane, Son,

 For soon you would be talking from the grave like me.”

 

This book is about the land of notorious plumbers. They know every corner of the old sewer system. Now, these plumbers also cause the blockages so that they come to unblock them! So that they are congratulated by all and sundry! These are often called white knights or Spotlight Rangers. Both concepts refer to someone who swoops in to solve a problem they likely instigated or encouraged, often to look good. 

 

These poems dwell on the township which teems with the boys and girls who play around the township corners and the bridges. Guvamatanga appears to sympathise with them. He gives them a voice that challenges stereotypes, often using humour, oral tradition, and solidarity, to survive and critique the "ways of big people in society".  Guvamatanga elevates the ordinary experiences of these little people, showcasing their joys, struggles, and culture as worthy of artistic representation.

 

Do not be sad... because there are many sunny love poems that anchor this book, with some clearly autobiographical! This collection operates like a notebook, insisting on being unfinished and unhinged too. The poet surely wanted to dance a new and ungainly dance through poetry. Many thanks to Onai Mushava for the inspiring selection and editing. Mushava himself is a firebrand poet. Viva Zimbabwean poetry!