The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
JAZZ maestro Hudson Simbarashe still recalls the first time he saw Zexie Manatsa live in Bulawayo.
It was not, as one would expect, on stage where thousands over the years came in droves from far and wide to shower the Doma-born with love, adulation and adoration.
Instead, it was Manatsa who brought his superstar presence to Simbarashe’s humble veranda in the equally humble suburb of Bellevue. When they met, Manatsa did not have an orchestra behind him. He did not have his favoured bass guitar under his arm but instead only had a few wads of cash in his hand.
“I was playing my guitar one day, while I was living at home in Bellevue and I saw someone standing by my gate. He said hello, I said I have noticed that you’re playing some nice music here and as he said that he just entered the yard.
He was just passing by on his way to the shops in Bellevue but the next thing I knew, he was standing by my gate. I didn’t know how to react and I remember asking if it was really him. You know how it is. I was star-struck.
“For me that encounter showed me how grounded he was. I was a nobody but the sound of my music attracted him to my verandah. It is very difficult to be excellent and humble at the same time but Manatsa was exactly that.
Whether it was music playing or interaction with people, he was excellent. He was a human being,” Simbarashe remembers.
As he had in many times of his life, Manatsa was only answering the call of music when he strolled into Simbarashe’s yard. It was an unmistakable call that had beckoned to him many times before.
It was the same call he heard all the way back in 1964 when, while in Harare looking to get a National ID, he decided to go to the City of Kings instead of his native Mhangura because, in his own words, “I inquired and realised that it was cheaper to go to Bulawayo than return to Mhangura.”
That trip to Harare at the age of 20, was his first away from the farm in Mhangura where he had been born the son of a hunter.
Rhodesia in the 1960s, where a promising musician like Manatsa dropped out of school in Standard Four at the age of 20, was no country for young black men.
But Manatsa, who had already learnt to play an assortment of music instruments despite his miseducation in an unkind school system, thought that in the country’s second largest city, then its industrial nerve centre, even young black men could become kings. Time would prove he was right.
Proficient on bass guitar and the pennywhistle, in Bulawayo Manatsa soon found himself in that nursery of talent, Jairos Jiri Centre, where alongside the likes of Fanyana Dube and brother Stanley. Staying in Nguboyenja, Manatsa and his comrades in song formed the Sunrise Kwela Band.
At the time the band was beginning its ascent in local music, South African music and artistes had already established an undeniable chokehold on Zimbabwean music lovers, with Mahotella Queens, Nzimande, Soul Shabalala, Sipho Bhengu, John Moriri, Felix’ Teaspoon ‘Ndelu, Mthunzini Girls touring the country for as long as a month, crisscrossing Chiredzi, Hippo Valley, Mutare, Harare, Gweru, Kwekwe and Bulawayo, then an economic and cultural hub in the country.
It was music from these groups that groups like Sunrise Kwela Band used to cover in popular nightspots and thus became an early influence on Manatsa who, after seven years in the City of Kings, became proficient in isiNdebele.
After leaving Sunrise Kwela Band on the request of a Bulawayo businessman named Homela who wanted them to play at his own nightclub, Manatsa recalled how his newfound group, Green Arrows Band, saw their popularity soar.
“We became so popular such that a number of business people approached us to play for them. When we were promised better working conditions, we moved on. Thus, we left Homela for a businessman who took us on a tour of Mozambique in 1972 where we played in a packed stadium in Beira,” Manatsa told journalist Wonder Guchu.
Even in racist and oppressive Rhodesia were a guerilla war that had long bubbled was now visibly on the surface, Manatsa’s road to redemption and superstardom had already been paved by hard work.
He was far from the down and out young men who had taken a train to Bulawayo with nothing in his pocket and hope burning in his chest.
After being scouted and signed to South African record label Gallo Records by West Nkosi, Manatsa and his Green Arrows recorded Chipo Chiroorwa, the first song by a black Zimbabwean to win a gold disc, having sold 25 000 copies back in the 1970s.
Simbarashe recalls how the sight of Manatsa walking around in the neighbourhood nonchalantly, was one to behold.
At a time when media was awash with stories of “white” heroes and black “villains” here was an artiste, who walked and spoke like them but had also attained an immeasurable level of success.
“This is the thing that used to amaze us. We would listen to him on the airwaves and ask ourselves that could be us one day.
Could we also be like this guy and have our music playing on the radio as local boys. We also wanted to be that guy who had his music blaring on the radios yet we could easily come across him at the shops. It was amazing. This guy could sing in many languages.
He could sing in Nyanja, he could sing in Ndebele and he could do the same in Shona, fluently. This guy was a bass player par excellence as well. He was the first bass player that I ever saw front a band and become famous,” he said.
Well Fargo’s Ebba Chitambo also recalls how even a Green Arrows jam session saw fans flock to get a taste of Manatsa.
“They used to practise in Pelandaba and whenever they were preparing, we made sure we were available to carry their instruments to the hall. At that time, we were not even playing ourselves but they had planted the seed in our heads.
He was like a big brother to us and I remember at one time, when he had moved back to Harare, he brought a brand-new Alfa Romeo and he would allow me drive it over the weekends when he was in Bulawayo for shows.”
A return to the capital for Manatsa was inevitable but it was only after a thorough education in the craft of music in the country’s cultural capital was sealed.
His reputation as a superstar, would be sealed there. This was made apparent during his wedding in 1979, an event that saw a full house at the hallowed Rufaro Stadium.
With everyone parting with $1 to see him declare his undying love for Stella Katehwe, Manatsa reportedly hired bank tellers to handle the fees and the gate takings on the day amounted to as much as $19 000.
As they had promised that day back 25 August, only death did them apart and Manatsa was still wedded to his sweetheart when he breathed his last on 20 January 2022.
Manatsa was to return to Bulawayo but it was after tragedy had struck in his life. Coming from a show in Chitungwiza early one morning in September 1987, he lost all his equipment and suffered memory loss after the accident.
Manatsa was travelling in a friend’s car and the mini bus that was carrying all the instruments and the other band members was behind them.
When the head-on collision occurred, the minibus rammed into the car in which Manatsa was in, destroying all his precious equipment. Soon he would find himself homeless and after a brief relocation to Churu Farm, he once again made a detour to Bulawayo, the city where he had discovered his true self.
“The last time that I saw him was in the late 1980s,” Chitambo recalls. “We had just come back from Botswana and while I was in town someone told me that Zexie was in town. When I went to see him, he told me that things weren’t going well and he had no musical equipment.
So, we put together the instruments that we had and we helped him put up a few shows. Eventually he got on his feet again.”
It was in Nketa 7, where he would hear another call that would change his life, choosing to dedicate his life to the lord.
“My conversion was like a calling. I was in the company of my wife coming from a beer hall when we heard people singing about Mwari waEzekiel. Jokingly, I said to my wife ‘isu ndisu vana vaMwari waEzekiel vacho. Handei nepo tonotora vasikana vari kuimba tivafundise kutamba chipisi dzemunyika’.
‘But when we got to the congregation, I was surprised to hear the pastor saying something about drowning and crying for help.
And I remembered a day when I almost drowned while on holiday in Kariba. The sermon touched me and when he asked whether there were people who were ready to follow Jesus, my wife and I stood up,” the late once said in an interview.
After reportedly battling alcoholism, Manatsa found salvation in his Lord.
In his prime, he lived a rockstar’s life. He rose from nothing, as a boy who had never seen much beyond the farm he grew up in.
From those humble beginnings, he so enthralled a nation, giving it its first taste of black superstardom. When all is said and done, only legitimate rockstars can pack 30 000 people in a stadium to see them get hitched.
When he died last Thursday at Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals at the age of 78, after a long a battle with cancer, his name had long been written in the annals of Zimbabwean music and entertainment in bold letters.
