Syndicated Loverboy – Oliver Mtukudzi in Kwekwe

Oliver Mtukudzi slept with life and death in the same bed. A syndicated loverboy who can be credited with lifting his music to higher truth rather than bending it down to personal weakness. Maybe the most convincing preachers are not the ones who embody their message but those who preach the loudest bit to themselves. Artists are, after all, in the human business of trying, like the rest of us.

Damning revelations about Tuku’s paternal negligence have called back his vindictive biographer Shepherd Mutamba’s observation, “He is a great man but not a good man.” There is no point quarrelling with the greatness of a man who comfortably outpolled the likes of Mansa Musa, Queen of Sheba and Zinedine Zidane in a Pan-African vote for the 100 Greatest Africans of All Time (New African, 2005). Tuku’s image is long fixed across the continent as a father-figure, philosopher of ubuntu and champion of children and women’s rights on albums like Neria soundtrack (1992), Was My Child (1993) and Paivepo (1999).

His serial bed-hopping and off-throne diversions in the hands of a femme fatale, however, saw him fail where it dearly mattered. His own house. A memorial held in his honor last week gave the picture of a hurting and divided family. His daughters, Sandra and Selmor, proceeded to dish on unresolved childhood trauma in a tell-all interview that has divided opinion.

Traditionalist gatekeepers have given the girls a tongue-lashing similar to what Mukoma waNgugi faced in March for revealing that his father, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, physically abused his late mother, Nyambura. It is not unusual for genius to flourish by burning up the life around it. Genius plays outside the rules, entitled and unaccountable, because it is not of this world. To be fair to the traditionalist school, Zimbabwe has already been the cult of the big man – Shefu, Comrade, Mbinga, Papa etc – for forty years. Superstition comes with the territory. 

On the other hand, there has been an outpouring of support for the Tuku girls. At this stage, nothing is braver and more sacred than for the legend’s daughters, Sandra and Selmor, to find closure. The girls must be heard and, as Shakespeare puts it, “Some of us will have to lie low.”

With that being said, I want to revisit the songs Tuku wrote in the heat of his family controversies and libertine adventures. What influence did Kwekwe have on his career over his decade there with his new family and an abused daughter from his first marriage? What was the divorce album he wrote his first wife, Melody, upon settling in the City of Gold? Which hometown rockstars did he kick it off with, having arrived from Harare without a band? What about his studio correspondence with Daisy, before and after Kwekwe?

Jamming in Kwekwe

“I just needed a new environment. ’Cause I’d been sick for too long,” Tuku explains the Kwekwe side of his career in Jennifer W. Kyker’s 2016 book, Living Tuku Music in Zimbabwe.

Before the City of Gold lined up with Tongai Moyo and Bob Nyabinde on the Zimbabwe hit parade, the hometown rockstars were called Zig-Zag Band. Just as Tuku married mbaqanga to katekwe, Zig-Zag were old music souls with an eclectic range called chigiyo. And, as expected of purists, they were out of work those days.

“As a sick person, I didn’t want to stay in bed,” Tuku recalls. “I wanted to go out. So, I used to go and visit Zig-Zag, and of course I would take the guitar and say, ‘Come on, let’s play this song.’ And hey, we came up with something new, and that was a band.”

Tuku was moving between marriages. But, if Wawona (1986) was a divorce album, it equally found him divorcing Harare and the Black Spirits. For the first time since Robert Mtukudzi baptized Wagon Wheels to Black Spirits in 1977, there was a Tuku album not attributed to the Spirits. In the Wawona liner notes, he adopted Zig-Zag as “my new backing band.”

“Hatimbotya”, a defiant “Samanyemba”-like joint introduced Gilbert Zvamaida, now with the Blacks Unlimited, on lead: “Kakomana kapfupi kanokwenya lead/ Kamunoona kupfupika kanokwenya lead”; George Paradza on vocals: “Tarira uone katete kudavira tsuri chaiyo/ Katete karefu, kudaira tsuri chaiyo;” and Stanley Phiri on drums: “Chitete chakati ndo-o, kangoma kwatu.” Fabian Chakamba on bass and Idan Banda on rhythm completed the Zig-Zag Band.

With “Kushaya Mwana”, also on Wawona, Tuku is turning his back on Harare, the perceived centre of the industry. Four tollgates away, here speaks a man who knows he is unique and individual enough to be a one-man show:

Vana vemhiriyo kukoma
Ndongoenda ndenga
Ndichatuma aniko?
Ndichangoita ndega.

(Ah stiff-necked children that side  
I will go it alone
Whom do I send
I will do it myself)

Not a few Tuku years were spent alone, unnoticed, bandless and structureless. On too many songs, his soul is breaking apart. A good number of these can be pinned back to family loss and social reflection. Some, like “Kushaya Mwana”, have a fully applicable social meaning on one hand, while being bitterly alert to his anonymous years and hardship on the tour bus on the other hand. Years later, when professional sanity kicked in with Debby Metcalfe, Tuku went on a money heist, rerecording and recompiling his ancients just to prove he had been the genuine article in town all along.

A Divorce Album

Barely a year apart, Tuku recorded two albums mourning his best friend and manager, Jack Sadza, Gona (1986) and his father, Samson Mtukudzi, Zvauya Sei (1987). The records spoke to some of the darkest hours of his life.

In the same period, he also found time to live it up in the blood streets of love and hate. Two albums, Gona (1986) and Wawona (1987), diarized his syndicated romance with Daisy and Melody. More specifically, the two albums gave his side of the story of two broken loves.

Barely a year after his 1979 wedding with Melody, Tuku started seeing Daisy and had a child with her in 1982. “During our time in Eastlea, around 1986, my love for Tuku began to wane because I was not happy with the marriage and the way I was being treated as a result of his relationship with Daisy,” Melody recalls in Shepherd Mutamba’s 2015 book, Tuku Backstage.

The legend made the most of his polygamous situation by going back to entertain Melody while Daisy was pregnant and unavailable for the business. In Mutamba’s book, there is a time when separation threatened to be final. Daisy has said, in a recent interview, she was separated from Tuku for one year, although it is not clear whether this coincides with the events of Tuku Backstage.

Per his biographer, Samanyanga went to his paramour’s house and stumbled into something that wasn’t quite to his liking. When he later followed her in Kwekwe after Melody had left, she waited for him with one question, “Handiti wakati gumbeze irefu?” (Didn’t you say the blanket is too long?) A Shona idiom best left in that form.

Whereas Tuku dedicates the Gona album to Jack Sadza in the liner notes, especially for the deep cut “Jeri”, the title track has the markings of a domestic saga:

Mupfuhwiraiko unenge sango?
Gona rawawana igona reuroyi
(What kind of love charm looks like a herb?
The herb you've found is a witching herb)

At Tuku’s funeral in February 2019, Melody said she left the singer because she didn’t want to be in a polygamous situation. They had continued living as husband and wife in Eastlea four years after Daisy came into the picture. Tuku’s first wife left him in 1986 and filed for divorce that year. Contested by Tuku, the divorce would only be effected in 1993. Melody’s belated reason was that Tuku had since paid a bride price for Daisy.

Meanwhile, Tuku was nursing a long illness with a stomach ulcer that preceded his diabetic diagnosis. Melody’s departure compounded his sense of abandonment. Bandless, bereaved and ill, he felt especially entitled to her comforts now, whatever shenanigans he was going about on the side. Not long after reuniting with Daisy in Kwekwe, he called the Melody situation what it was and threw himself into a divorce album. 

Ndakakutsvaka pandairwara;
Ndiyo nguva yawakandisema.
Ndaikufunga pandairwara;
Ndiyo nguva yawakanditiza
Siyana neni ndakatsvaga wandinoda
Siyana neni uchatsvaga waunoda

(I sought your company when I was sick;
That’s when you flinched from me.
I was thinking of you from my sickbed;
That’s the time you left me.
Leave me alone, I found the one I love.
Leave me alone; you will find the one you love)

To crown his newfound Kwekwe nationalism, Tuku lines up at the bus terminus in different outfits on the album cover. He soon found his feet in the leafy Glenwood suburb and rubbed shoulders with many a proven and future great, including Tongai Moyo and Brian Sibalo.

Manager Complex

Daisy’s hold on Tuku took can be speculated this way. Tuku had never been known for his good management. The first stream of Black Spirits had stayed on the road for sheer passion, living hand to mouth, suffering through avoidable logistical binds, and playing second-tier to better-managed contemporaries like the Green Arrows and the Blacks Unlimited.

Daisy brought sanity into Tuku’s life, when the ground was shifting around him. In her arms, he had the luxury of being a self-involved artist who couldn’t be bothered about real life. The bargain worked too well musically but alienated Tuku from the children of his first marriage.

For all his 66 albums, Tuku was without a band for a good bit of 1980s and 1990s. Black Spirits had been born out of Wagon Wheels in 1977 with Robert Mtukudzi on rhythm, Jimmy Austin on drums, Joseph Alpheus on bass and Bartholomew Chirenda on keyboard.

During a slightly modified stream band’s first overseas tour in 1983, the drummer and the bassist sabotaged the last show over unfair compensation. Back home, the prolific songwriter worked with borrowed hands on a string of deeply felt albums, even releasing twice in a good year.

But his bandless situation was increasingly untenable when he fell sick in 1986 and struggled to finish, Zvauya Sei, the tribute album for his father.

Mudhara Mtukudzi had been an enthusiastic support and taken care of the musician in his illness. The sudden blow of his death in 1986, hard upon his manager and best friend Jeri’s passing the previous year, left him on shifting ground. Melody’s exit in the same year, and the persistent interference of health trouble with work left him in need of a support system.

When Tuku met Daisy in 1981, she was the stereotypical independent woman staying with her child from a failed marriage. She had a low opinion of Tuku’s wife, who would have been barely 20 at the time.

Somewhat the child of her in-laws, Melody laughed with them over a bottle of beer, while the formal and determined Daisy was caught up in cold calculus. After checking off few boxes, crowned by a bridal ceremony. Daisy judged Melody for walking out on her own marriage, as Tuku made a beeline for the start-over at Daisy’s house in Kwekwe.

Daisy gave Tuku what he needed: a new start and career stability. And took from him what he forgot: a father-daughter relationship. If you are not caught up on the legend’s relationship with his daughters, here is their tell-all interview on the Ollah 7 podcast.  

A Man of the Church

The Kwekwe years start off subdued, and mellow into gospel albums, Ndotomuimbira (1990), Rumbidzai Jehovah (1992) and Pfugama Unamate (1994). The songs are lifted wholesale from the Presbyterian hymnbook, where Tuku’s parents had been more than able choristers in Highfield, and the Methodist church where Tuku followed Daisy in Kwekwe and was almost a regular, bar weekend bookings.  

The gospel years find Tuku all alone in the Lord’s vineyard, playing acoustic, bass, drums and keyboards by turn. With the acoustic guitar, Tuku somewhat calls back touches of Jordan Chataika, one of the solo guitarists he trained himself to. The first album of the pack is dedicated to Daisy, who whatever else she is, is not a average muse.

The 1997 solo album, Ndega Zvangu, marks an end to the occasionally bandless Kwekwe years. Having been reunited with Black Spirits, he lost three band members, including his brother Robert, months apart. From “Andinzwi” to the original “Ndasakura Ndazunza” and “Ndakuneta,” a note of dejection and anonymity sours the legendary baritone.