mbira

Mbira comes from the Shona language of Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the Bantu language of the Shona people who have played the instrument for more than a thousand years. The word is linguistically related to the broader Bantu family of names for lamellar instruments — marimba, balafon, kalimba — all of which share roots in the Bantu words for individual keys or notes. English first recorded mbira around 1910, though the instrument had been described by Portuguese traders and missionaries in the sixteenth century under various names: marimba (used then for both xylophone-type and lamellophone instruments), sanza, and other transliterations. The Shona word mbira became the standard English term in the twentieth century as ethnomusicologists began to distinguish carefully among the different instrument types.

The mbira dzavadzimu — mbira of the ancestors — is the ritual instrument at the center of Shona religious practice. It consists of 22 to 28 metal tines (keys) mounted on a hardwood soundboard, played by the two thumbs and the right forefinger. The instrument is placed inside a large gourd resonator called a deze, and small shells or bottle caps are attached to the soundboard to create a buzzing overtone quality that, in Shona acoustics, is considered beautiful rather than a defect. This buzzing — called nyunga — is deliberately cultivated: it is believed to attract the vadzimu, the ancestral spirits, creating the acoustic conditions in which possession ceremonies can occur. The mbira is not merely a musical instrument but a communications technology for contact between the living and the dead.

The mbira's role in Shona spiritual life centers on the bira ceremony, an all-night gathering in which mbira music creates the conditions for the vadzimu to speak through mediums. The ceremonial mbira music follows specific modal patterns called modes or 'songs,' each associated with particular ancestral spirits. A mbira player must know dozens of these songs, their associated rituals, and the protocols governing when and how they are played. The knowledge takes years to acquire; a skilled mbira player is also a ritual specialist, a keeper of ancestral memory in musical form. When Zimbabwe achieved independence in 1980, there was an explicit political effort to revive mbira culture, which colonial missionary activity had suppressed as 'devil worship.' The mbira became an emblem of cultural sovereignty as well as religious practice.

The worldwide discovery of the mbira's music in the second half of the twentieth century produced a complex of influences and borrowings. The album The Soul of Mbira, recorded by ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner in 1973, introduced the instrument's sound to Western listeners. Zimbabwean musicians including Thomas Mapfumo incorporated mbira patterns into his chimurenga (liberation) music, creating a popular genre that spread the mbira's distinctive rhythmic and harmonic patterns internationally. Mbira music's characteristic interlocking patterns — in which individual players each contribute repeating phrases that interlock to create a larger whole, heard differently depending on where you focus your attention — have influenced composers and musicians from Steve Reich (who acknowledged African music's influence on his minimalism) to contemporary electronic producers. The thousand-year-old instrument is now a recognized influence on global contemporary music.