Thomas Mapfumo

Thomas Mapfumo transformed Zimbabwe's popular music by releasing a track whose melody he had composed himself, breaking from the prior custom of drawing traditional songs exclusively from melodies passed down across generations. His chimurenga style, meaning "music of struggle," rose to prominence amid the civil war against white minority rule, though its success provoked official hostility. In 1977 authorities confined him to a prison camp on subversion charges. He secured release by consenting to perform for the ruling party, only to restrict the set to his most inflammatory material. "I told them that since I'd been in detention, I didn't have time to write new ones." Raised in the countryside, he attended a British colonial school and tended cattle as a herd boy. The Beatles and Wilson Pickett reached him in the early '60s, prompting him to learn guitar on his own and assemble a band that mixed pop from other African nations with Beatles, Rolling Stones, funk, and soul numbers. He then abandoned Western material to launch the Acid Band, whose debut album Hokoyo (Beware) included the songs that had prompted his detention. After Zimbabwe achieved liberation in 1978, Mapfumo founded Blacks Unlimited and issued Gwindingwe Rine Shumba (Lion in the Bush), an exuberant tribute to independence. Jumbo Van Renen, then president of Earthworks Records, organized the release of Mapfumo's recordings in England; years later, after Van Renen became CEO of Island Records in the U.K., he signed the artist to a worldwide contract.