Chimurenga | Robert Machiri

Chimurenga—revolution as rupture, as the moment history swerves and won’t apologize. This turn moves through the music of Thomas Mapfumo, who pulled the mbira into the present and turned it into a living circuit. Ancestral sound becomes political force, carrying Zimbabwean memory across Pan-African horizons and into the grit of everyday life.

Placing Mapfumo back-to-back with Fela Kuti and others in between, this session listens for an African modernity that arrives loud and unresolved—where tradition is not preserved but reactivated, and revolution finds its rhythm.