“NHAI iwe Saunyama! Ndiudzire uyu we magetsi kuti chigetsi chake icho chiri kunditeya (Saunyama can you please tell the person doing the lights that they are too bright),” Ambuya Stella Chiweshe shouted.
I responded from backstage: “Ari kuramba Ambuya hanzi ndiro riri kudiwa na cameraman (He is saying the cameraman told him that’s the ideal light).”
“Kubva musiye akadaro, ini ndoitawo zvangu (In that case I will not be bothered),” she resignedly retorted.
Ambuya Chiweshe put her mbira down and opened her kasha (snuff container), drew hard on the powdered tobacco, after which she blew her nose into her three-metre blue cloth and tied a knot around the snuff tainted spot on the cloth.
She slowly spread the cloth wide and covered her feet. She then stretched out her legs as she sat on the floor.
Her movements were slow and relaxed, ignoring the impatient whispers from the 4 000-strong mesmerised audience who had paid for the 90-minute set; and I felt for them.
After picking up her mbira, she tweaked a few knobs on her Marshall amplifier, (hated those high trebles she did) and went on to cover her head and her whole body.
That bright light she so hated now hovered over her lone blue silhouette on the stage. I could hear the hearts thumping around the theatre in the palpable silence.
A tantalising thump on a bass note, pause! A machine gun staccato of cascading notes, smoothly flowing into Kasahwa! She started whistling, a haunting whistle, which raises the hair to its ends on a dark night.
A ghost’s whistle? Or that of a mermaid? Or rather of an angel? Her whistling perfectly complemented the mbira notes, creating a somewhat crazy harmony.
There was no hosho (rattles) playing, but I could feel it go “kuwa kuwa kuwa!” as she was wont to call it in.
My eyes wandered to the front row audience, espied a few teary shiny faces.
She stopped playing, and her voice boomed: “Take off your shoes!”
Sounds of shoes being removed (did not know such a sound could be heard) I heard the shoes come off, then she took off up the hill with Kasahwa, and the haunting whistle now the rolling wheels of a cow-drawn cart.
Ambuya Chiweshe never stopped or changed to another song and more than an hour later — a five-minute pause — and the show was over.
Some of the barefooted members of the audience were on the dance floor, others in the aisles, but for most of the dim outlines in the seats, doning eerily shining faces, the tears were now free flowing.
I walked onto the stage to calm the disorder wrought by autograph hunters, only to discover that they were not clamouring for Ambuya Chiweshe’s autograph: They were bute (snuff) hunters! Sometime later the theatre was empty, except for the shoes! Vamwe vakasiya shangu (Some left their shoes behind)!
Go well Mutenhesanwa. Ndima yamakarova makadzikisa gejo, hapashayi chinomera. Ndinotenda muchembere (You acquitted yourself well. Thank you grandma).
The late mbira queen is set to be buried this afternoon in Masembura village in Chiweshe, after government denied her national heroine status — which many of us in the arts sector felt would have been more befitting, given her role in lifting the national flag and Zimbabwean culture on the international scene.
She was granted a lesser honour of a State-assisted funeral, quite an anti-climax for someone of her larger-than-life stature, if I were to dare say.
Chiweshe succumbed to brain cancer at her Kuwadzana home in Harare last Friday aged 76.
The songbird was married to Peter Reich, a German national.
Joshua Mufunde is a renowned lead guitarist and served as a member of Ambuya Chiweshe’s band for many years.
