Once upon a time in Zimbabwe, a hacker was someone who bent over mbira keys, thumbed his way into your soul and messed around till time meant nothing to you. Since then, generations of lead guitarists from Stanley Manatsa to Trust Samende have made their case as the new keepers of the keys. We don’t talk about them if we don’t talk about Clive “Mono” Mukundu.

To begin with, his latest nickname, Gwenyagitare, hints at this ancient office of the musician, while marking the evolution of enchantment from the mbira to the guitar. Gently disposed, if assertive, and skinny like his old boss, Oliver Mtukudzi, you will never know what chaos Mr Mukundu is capable of till he kneads a whirlwind out of the fingerboard, floating you far away from the reaches of known language. To memories and fancies only a guitar in the hands of a master can define.

Talking of language, Mono’s guitar speaks with a Zimbabwean accent, the accent that runs through his work, from the great Tuku albums, the Chamhembe renaissance and the Afrika Revenge-Pax Afro years to the Zimdancehall turn and guns for the new decade like Mbeu and Tocky Vibes. Not yet 50, Mono has played more than 1000 albums, sungura, chimurenga, reggae, rhumba, even holding his own as the go-to guitarist for the Pentecostal community.

It turns out that when he is not dropping the beats like the world is about to end, Mono will be busy writing books. His first book, Following the Melody (2017), is the story of his life, while the second, Poor and Famous (2018), deep-dives into the economics of the music industry.

I revisit the debut, launched on this day three years ago onto the swelling shelf of Zimbabwean music books (thank you, Shepherd Mutamba, Mhoze Chikowero, Joyce Jenje-Makwenda and Fred Zindi).

The memoir traces the multi-talented instrumentalist’s career and shares three decades of insight into the industry. The musician comes across as a captivating storyteller, detaining the reader from start to finish with a story of love, talent, conviction, passion, spirituality and victory.

I opened the book on the eve of the launch and would not skip a word till I came to his parting words for fellow artists “to always research and be prepared to persevere”. The persuasion to write books is something we hear often with respect to war heroes but Mono knows too well about the other heroes who have helped to defined Zimbabwe to the world.

His guitar chops are there among their cultural exports and so he sits down to tell his own story, a hero’s story. Following the Melody is published by his Monolio Studios and edited by Phillip Chidavaenzi and Simba Mudokwani. Joyce Jenje-Makwenda, herself a library of an elder, prefaces the memoir.

Although he is also putting in hours at the campus, Mono does not have much use for the academic rituals that slow down books of this kind, opting to light up every passage with the personal. Ever hungry like Oliver Twist, Mono is asking for new accolades as a writer.

One of the key things about the book is honesty. Mukundu dishes out the sins of his youth, passing himself as the relatable industry uncle. The kind of thing pastors like to do to show that they also used to be wild.

In the end, we are confronted with a breathless memoir, punctuated by meditative moments about how new artists can make it. The young artist occupies real estate in Uncle Mono’s heart. Advice to artists preoccupy his social media and make up his second book.

So what was Gwenyagitare up to in the olden days?

It was “Pamuchato waTobias” singer Admire Kasenga who baptised Clive Mukundu with the stage name “Mono”. Early into their careers, the two performed together in a band called Chaks Brothers. That sort of band only someone like Fred Zindi would remember. Despite maintaining a nightlife itinerary, the band did not record, resulting in occasional flops.

Mukundu, freshly out of school, kept a single dreadlock, with respect to which the name Mono occurred to Kasenga and another band member. The name stuck so that even when he was led to Jesus by Pastor Admire Kasi in 1994, he simply changed to Baba Mono.

The joint tenure with Kasenga was not all bromantic. They vied for the leadership of the band, with Kasenga wanting to prefix his name to a band Mono had been voted to lead. The former argued that he was the natural frontman since he was the lead vocalist, while Mono could not see how his lyrical contributions and musical arrangement was any less important.

Credit wars would persist in subsequent bands. Never one to be subsumed into an equal contributor’s shadow, Mono would leave Chikokoko, another band that got named after a fellow band member. Misdirected attribution has been a thing in a number of Zimbabwean bands. Remarkably, Biggie Tembo emerged as the natural frontman of the Bhundu Boys, though he only joined a band Rise Kagona had already assembled.

People remember Mitchell Jambo as the leader of Zim Cha Cha Cha Kings during the “Vimbiso”- “Ndichamutora Chete” years but he was only the lead vocalist – the doorkeeper who had happened into a lucky slot in David Ziome’s band and proved to be “that man.” Four Brothers lead vocalist and drummer Marshall Munhumumwe had to play cold calculus with Patrick Mukwamba as the latter’s songs, “Vakakunda Zviyedzo”, “Bonus” and “Usanyara Basa Rako” shot to the top, priming him for the title role in the band.

Back to Gwenyagitare’s early strivings, the man was never far from misadventure. When a row over the splitting of gate takings erupted between his relatively obscure band and Pied Pipers, knives shone from both sides and Mono breezed home, running into barbed wire and thud-falling into the night. The police readily sided with Piped Pipers, the now-disbanded big boys from Mbare famed for “Ruva Rangu”.

In his recollections, Mono is bitterly alert to problems of the underdog. Poverty is almost tangible in much of the memoir, right up to the Black Spirits stint, but Mono never backs down. Looking back, he prizes the hungry years for helping him hit the high notes away from the confusion of the bright lights. Desperation is inspiration.

“It seems musicians are at their creative peak during times of hardship, before their breakthrough,” he makes sense of this experience. “Maybe that’s why about 99 percent of the world’s greatest artistes come from very poor backgrounds. It’s my advice to most musicians every time to compose as many songs as possible before they hit the big time, because it seems to me that once things fall into place, a huge chunk of inspiration is blown away.”

A child of divorce and coming-of-age misfortunes including the imprisonment of his father for embezzlement, it seemed foolhardy for Mono to pursue a career in music, especially given the trade’s uncertain returns.

Bohemian faith sees him through a series of low points and an unseen hand occasionally saves him for music, particularly when he hangs his guitar to fend for his pregnant wife, only to be signed by Admire Kasi for Egea Gospel Train which stars Ivy Kombo and Carol Chivengwa at the time.

He threatens to leave on several occasions, with unholy lifestyles in the band weighing down on his newfound Christian faith. Pastor Kasi’s violent temper which sometimes translates into physical attacks on subordinates, and erratic remuneration does not make the going any easier. (These details do not appear in the final edition of the book. The guitarist mistakenly sent me an earlier version of the book as a review copy).

Although Mono appears reasonably Christian in much of the book, even abstaining from both playing and listening to secular music at some point in his career, he has many axes to grind against most of the pastors he works for as a band member.

In some cases, poorly remunerated musicians are instructed to stretch their stipends across their needs through faith while the pastors fare sumptuously like Arab oil barons. When the pastors testify to the effect that God is rewarding their faith with riches, Mono sees them. What they call faith as naked exploitation.

Before finding God, Mono runs into the accidental horrors of an ungoverned life. In the early 1990s, he picks sexually transmitted infections on two occasions after falling to peer pressure and proving his bravado on prostitutes. He witnesses former band members succumbing to Aids, a sustained scourge on sungura artists, beginning with Bhundu Boys guitarist David Mankaba’s high-profile battle with the condition in the early 1990s, and commit himself to celibacy.

A self-abasing honesty which leaves the Shepherd Mutamba school of biographers out of a job is one of the strong points of this book. Jenje-Makwenda calls it “kuzviyanika” and applauds it as an important feature for a community’s introspection and progress.

Poverty follows the young guitarist closer than his shadow, necessitating a cover-up when his worried mother follows his struggling band to Mutare from Harare. He is on her heels shortly after as the band, hungry and unwashed, asks for a free ride with a Harare-bound football team, enduring ungenerous taunts throughout the trip. As hunger persists through the 1990s, Mono’s art only gets better. He gives up comfort for bohemian self-sacrifice.

Mono’s wife Jean predictably features on the dedication page and much of the book for loving him when no woman would have any business hanging around a broke artist (Yes, I hope to heaven future wife reads this para). Anyway, one such crushworthy, Melo-typa madam butterfly writes Mr Mukundu an essay-length letter theorising why it is foolish to date a hungry artist.

If you don’t remember anything from Mono’s many advices, remember independence. Tuku needed to explore a more traditional sound, phasing out Mono’s guitar with marimba for albums like Dairai. Mono lost a job and found wisdom. He put his parting compensation into a long-term project of his own, the Hatfield-based Monolio Studios. His pride over this decision knows no bounds.

Gwenyagitare got his fingerprints on Zimbabwean gold: Chiwoniso Maraire, Willom Tight, Somandla Ndebele, Mafriq, Africa Revenge, Celebration Choir, Ruvhuvhuto Sisters, Brian Sibalo, Shingisai Suluma, Alexio Kawara, Mahendere Brothers and hundreds more projects. When he got something to say, I am down for that science.

An earlier version of this article appeared in The Herald