The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Correspondent
ON 7 September last year, a reporter in Bulawayo caught wind of news that Oliver Mtukudzi was in town from a source. Tuku was in town for a gig and, the source said, there was a chance to get a rare interview with the Zimbabwean music great.
In 2018 Tuku was, as ever, a story that no reporter worth his salt could ignore and true to the source’s word, Tuku was where he said he would be – at a posh breakfast joint in the City of Kings.
A few seconds after his entrance, even the most ignorant would have guessed that a star had entered the building. In an instant, the place just felt smaller, the air in the room felt just a little thinner. An elephant had entered the room and he seemed to be taking more than his fair share of space and oxygen.
Some patrons, perhaps fighting the instinct to lose their usual calm at Tuku’s presence, continued on their merry way even though a casual observer could see that they were also disturbed. Most gave up all pretences of ignorance and more than and some jaws stopped working completely as a few expensive breakfast plates went cold in front of their owners. On that morning fans, young and old, fed their eyes instead of their stomachs, fixing their gaze on their new-found object of obsession. Just a couple of weeks shy of his 66th birthday, Tuku could still turn heads.
The reporter who had been tipped off about Tuku’s breakfast destination was nervous as the people who were fawning over the music icon. It had been a couple of years since his last encounter with the maestro and that first meeting had not gone to script. He had gone to that first meeting expecting the Tuku he knew from his music, the man who dispensed wisdom through song, a master teacher who wrapped metaphor and idiom inside an intoxicating and seamless blend of traditional and modern instruments.
Instead he found a musician that had discarded all the charm that seemed to drip off him while he was on stage moments earlier. In an instant, that sideline interview in the wee hours of the morning outside the Bulawayo City Hall had turned into a hostile question and answer session.
During that encounter on 7 September, Tuku was still a no-nonsense interview subject, firing back sarcasm at straightforward questions. He did not bare all his fangs fully, however, and was forthcoming on some questions. During one of those few occasions that he was sincere, Tuku had confessed that he had songs with the late Hugh Masekela but he doubted that they would ever see the light of day. Hugh, who died exactly on the day that his friend was to depart a year later, had left Tuku with an unfinished project and a whole lot of questions.
“The trumpet is just not there,” he said as he threw his hands like one who had been abandoned and forsaken.
It is a little over four months since I, the reporter in question, saw that look of haplessness in Tuku’s face and, as the tributes pour in from all over the world, it is an expression many had this week as they come to terms with their loss. Tuku’s guitar and Masekela’s trumpet will resume their marriage after a year’s separation but this time only the angels will hear the music coming from that matrimony.
In simple terms, Tuku was a freak of nature and talking to him up close just made one more appreciative of his enormous talent. His voice, a unique feature that came to define his music, was extremely hoarse and one would question, after 67 albums, if this was a because of overuse.
When one interviewed him, he seemed to squeeze the words out of a chest that did not always cooperate with its owner. Indeed some words seemed to even get lost before they reached his lips. It made him even more difficult to interview but it helped define his music.
Together with that trademark cough, his husky voice made him an artiste that was truly impossible to imitate and it made the message in his music that much easier to digest. It was a voice that you believed. It was a voice that you had to believe.
When Tuku sang so solemnly about death on Mabasa you had no doubt that HIV/Aids was an enemy that had taken comfortable residence among the people. It had to be eradicated. That the scourge was enjoying a bumper harvest was obvious, but what was needed was one musician to gather that deluge of tears from funeral wakes across the country and package them into a mournful seven minutes of song.
When Tuku spoke, one could feel like they were being addressed by an elder, a wise man who spoke as if he had lived life before and had been sent back to earth to guide those that did not know better. ‘This is the way’, his music seemed to suggest.
But it was his voice that was both equally haunting and comforting. That voice seemed to have a life of its own, separate from the man himself. It seemed to be an instrument in its own right and perhaps should have been credited as a separate member of his band, the Black Spirits.
During shows that voice could talk about the pain inflicted by an abusive father on Tozeza Baba to a crowd of intoxicated revellers dancing the night away. That was Tuku’s gift. Here was a man who could get the people singing and dancing about their most painful experiences. His music represented neither doom nor gloom but a bit of both.
For every Neria there was a Shamiso and the cruel, thoughtless father in Tozeza Baba found his equivalent in the flawed, regretful parent found in Hazvireve. After some rain, Tuku always sprinkled a bit of sunshine on his listener. With a guitar in his hands, he could get Zimbabweans singing while the tears had yet to dry on their cheeks.
It is perhaps, more than anything, this quality that Zimbabweans will miss the most. Tuku and his guitar have been there when Zimbabwe has gone through its ups and downs.
He was there, strumming his guitar at the tail end of the country’s bitterly fought and costly liberation struggle with songs like chart topper Dzandimomotera and he was there again in the early 90s when Esap had the country’s economy screaming. Tuku Music and other albums were there to comfort the country through the years of economic hardship and international isolation at the start of this century.
He poured melody and wisdom into grateful ears during the rough days of 2008 and when the days got brighter, he was still there, with his guitar by the people’s side.
Now Zimbabweans were perhaps once again looking at Tuku for guidance and comfort. Now more than ever, Zimbabwe needs its musicians, wise men and elders to speak words of wisedom. Tuku fell into all those categories but now, in this hour of need, his guitar has fallen silent.
This time it is for good. After a career that lasted over four decades, Zimbabwe has to find a new voice to pick up the burden. On 23 January, at ripe age of 66, the country lost its poet, a deserving national hero as buttressed by President Mnangagwa.
