Content area
Full Text
WITH THE death of John Chibadura, a year after two members of his group, the Tembo Brothers, the handful of Zimbabwean popular musicians who brought their country's music bouncing and jiving on to European stages in the Eighties is further reduced.
Chibadura was a true working-class entertainer. His job, unlike that of Zimbabwe's most famous musical ambassador, Thomas Mapfumo, whose political lyrics and messianic air gave him a strong intellectual feel, was to make people dance, and for much of his career he did this from a little stage in the beer garden of the hotel Nyamutamba in the popular suburb of Chitungwiza in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, where his band would start in the afternoon and play solidly through until 4am. Chibadura was nicknamed "Mr Chitungwiza", after the suburb, which is heavily populated by musicians, and he never left his patch when he started to earn big money, although his house...