Chimbetu: 'I am a critic of foolish politics'

Chimbetu: 'I am a critic of foolish politics'

ON STAGE: Chimbetu wows the crowds at London's Stratford Rex

• EXCLUSIVE: Mzekezeke interview

• EXCLUSIVE: Mafikizolo interview

By Mduduzi Mathuthu

WHEN we put a news flash on the website last week about our forthcoming interview with sungura music king Simon “Chopper” Chimbetu, the floodgates to hell flung open.

New Zimbabwe.com was now a Zanu PF mouth-piece, some of our readers shouted. Simon Chimbetu is the musician who has become embedded with the ruling Zanu PF party and has in fact boasted of evicting a white commercial farmer in Kadoma at the height of the infamous land grabs, we were reminded.

You got the feeling we had done or were about to do something treacherous by giving space to Chimbetu. But we remained determined to talk to Chimbetu. It has always been our policy not to judge anyone, but rather hear their story and present it to the court of public opinion.

So when I was ushered into Chimbetu’s dressing room just before he went on stage in Bradford, England, a picture of a militant war veteran averse to reasonable dialogue started forming in my mind.

“You are ex-Daily News and you now work for the dot com thugs? So what do you want from me,” I expected he would say when I introduced myself.

Much to my shock, and maybe disappointment (being mouthed off by celebrity is usually a good story), Chimbetu greeted me with a hug, then offered me a seat just adjacent to him.

“Every Zimbabwean is a friend,” he told me. “We all have different views about issues but we are Zimbabwean first and we should not forget that.”

Clad in jeans from top to bottom and wearing a huge smile, it was hard to believe that the man I was looking at -- a former music icon for many – is the war veteran credited with forcibly driving out farmers in Kadoma.

"I am a critic of foolish politics"

SIMON CHIMBETU

At 49, Chimbetu looks as fit as a fiddle. Memories of those sell-out shows that I used to watch at the Large City Hall in Bulawayo came flooding back. It was hard to believe that once Zimbabwe’s best seller, the man before me is currently fighting to stay afloat in the music industry after years of dominance.

I mentioned a call I had made to my sister who is by no means a music enthusiast. I had told my sister in Zimbabwe that I would be interviewing Chimbetu later in the day, to which she had responded: “Chimbetu is a nobody here….he now plays in the Growth Points like System Tazvida.”

The expression on his face was that of utter amazement and disdain. Chimbetu, who describes himself as a "critic of foolish politics" is a man of conviction and courage, as I later discovered during the interview. He intelligently picks his words, calmly spitting them out with much hand gesticulation.

“Yes I play at Growth Points, but is there anything wrong with that?,” he quizzed me. “How do you grow as a musican if you don’t play at Growth Points? I find that the most normal thing to do and it gives me much satisfaction to be among the people who got me to where I am today.

“I have never been a main to exclusively play in comfy surroundings,” he said. “I went to war and saw how my friends suffered, died and were buried in shallow pits. Their suffering and my own has caused me to detest luxury.”

The man might not be popular in Zimbabwe, but in the UK he was a hit. At least 2000 people attended his show at London’s Stratford Rex, and they were not disappointed. Oozing confidence and defiance, Chimbetu belted tunes from old and the recent past as the first artist on stage before Mzekezeke and Mafikizolo, and then returned to bring down the curtain.

But no public showing of defiance can cloak the fact that Chimbetu is currently news for what his fans rightly see as the wrong reasons.

Last month, two war veterans took him to court over a disputed farm in Kadoma which measures 500 hectares. Chimbetu is engaged in maize farming, milk and cheese production and cattle rearing on the farm.

"What I am saying to these two fellow war veterans is that they are my
brothers and I am prepared to share with them because we waged the Third
Chimurenga together in the district….,” Chimbetu told a Herald reporter.

The Third Chimurenga he refers to is the violent seizure of white commercial farms by President Robert Mugabe’s shock troops. Surely, that can’t be right for a musician who still wants to further his career, I put it to him.

“It will be difficult to convince me that what I am doing is wrong,” Chimbetu retorted. “We are correcting a part of history which for many years our younger generation did not learn maybe due to the education system, or they were simply not allowed to learn.”

By now I was feeling the political animal inside Chimbetu, as his face contorted with every sentence.

“I fought in the liberation war and still think of my comrades who died in my arms,” Chimbetu says as he warms up to his theme. “They never fought for their own families alone but they fought so that Zimbabweans can repossess what had been taken away from them by the whites.

“I look at the opposition parties across Africa, just as I look at all new things that come up, and I realise that they have no base. I am a revolutionary and what I see in most of our opposition parties is a group of people who have no foundation, they can’t think on their own.

“Such parties have no national interest but rather selfish ambitions and don’t deserve to lead the people and the people don’t deserve to be led by them. In fact we must not talk about them because they are already out of the game. That is why you are seeing revolutionary movements across Africa reinventing themselves and identifying with the people while the opposition is waning.”

Being a war veteran is not wrong, I reasoned with Chimbetu. But the accompanying violence that has become part of the Zimbabwean life must surely be something that he thinks about.

"I am against violence," he says. "If we fight, that's when the enemy will gain access to our minds and begin to control us....fighting among ourselves will make things worse."

Such is Chimbetu’s connection with the liberation war that he has named his farm and his backing band Dendera, after the Mozambican camp which the Chimbetu brothers called home during the revolutionary struggle against white settlers in the 1970s.

As a musician, Chimbetu, like many before him, found his footing in a band before heading out to pursue a solo career, first finding success in the Marxist Brothers.

The Marxist Brothers eventually dissolved in the mid-90s as the members left to pursue their own careers, while others joined Simon's backing band, Dendera Kings. This set the stage for Simon to assume the position of one of Zimbabwe's premier sungura artists.

Taking the torch from acts such as Jonah Moyo, Chimbetu hit stardom with albums such as Survival, and Lullaby. Compared to most Zimbabwe rhumba and sungura, Simon's songs feature guitar solos sandwiched between prominent vocal lines and repetitive guitar riffs. His music is similar to that of his earlier band, the Marxist Brothers, as well as popular rhumba musician Leonard Zhakata. His songs tend to focus on the working class and the poor; unsurprisingly, therefore, Chimbetu has come out in support of the recent land grab.

It is time for Chimbetu to go on stage. As I am ushered out, it is clear to me that Chimbetu will not change his views about the events in Zimbabwe. He is so convinced he is right that he will risk his career to hold on to his views. Brave man, I think to myself.

“When no-one likes Chimbetu anymore,” he says as I prepare to walk out, “tell them to remember the good things that I did.”
There!
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