White doctor, black music: what Goldberg's mbira taught me - reflection on racism and African culture - Cover Story

Commonweal, June 3, 1994 by Sondlo Leonard Mhlaba

I lived in Boston's South End then. Going to Newton for a Sunday afternoon party felt like heading for the ends of the world. How would I get there? I didn't have a car. I would have to take the D Train to Riverside and then walk up Grove Street.

Doctor Jones (not his real name) and his family were wonderful hosts. A couple of the children had grown up in Zimbabwe and could speak Shona--which made me feel comfortable rather quickly. Their father had spent several years practicing medicine in Mount Selinola, a lovely corner of Zimbabwe. There were several other guests, most of them white. This was 1976 and the Zimbabwe Patriotic Front (PF) was still fighting to unseat lan Smith and establish majority rule. I was a PF member and district officer. The party at Dr. Jones's gave me an opportunity to talk about the PF's political views before what was, evidently, a sympathetic group. I had also been told that Newton had many influential people: "You never know who's in the audience," I thought. I drank several cups of tea and ate more than my share of pastries to ease the initial awkwardness.

The man sitting next to me and caressing a mbira was Doctor Goldberg (not his real name). He was the guest of honor. He had spent some time studying African musicology with an old man in a "tribal village" far from civilization. The old man had also taught him how to play mbira, a traditional instrument made of a gourd resonator and several turned metal strips which vibrate when plucked. Dr. Goldberg spoke passionately about how he tried to get the university in Zimbabwe to grant his village mentor a college degree..The university had no problem awarding Goldberg a Ph.D. in African musicology, but it could not image granting a music degree to a ragtag village elder.

I listened with great interest as Goldberg spoke. His sincerity was quite evident and what he said was surprising to me. Even though a black African, I had never thought of our elders as educated individuals. I don't mean to suggest that I thought they were dumb! But educated? Goldberg continued to talk about the mbira and its place in the Shona community. Then he began to play a tune. I shifted, took a gulp of the tea, and shifted again. I was uncomfortable. There was something wrong with this picture: a white man playing a mbira without the slightest sign of self-consciousness. He began to sing; then he strummed harder, looking at the ceiling and jerking his head rhythmically. He sang in country Chizezuru, a language unspoiled by foreign tongues, painting in poetry a landscape of past glories, of children lost to the cities, of hunger where none was before, of victorious freedom fighters and the dawn of a new day. He plucked harder, then went into the nonverbal traditional. "Oh. . .eeyea. . .eeyea. . .eeyea. . . .!"

I. . .Well, you have to understand. . . .

I had not known a white person until I was a teen-ager. I had grown up in a traditional village where the housing consisted of small stick-and-mud huts in which the dirt floors were polished with cow dung. We are talking about a simpler life here; perhaps from a thousand years ago, in a manner of speaking. And I didn't have to be reincarnated.

As a growing boy, I would watch the sun rise like a barrel of burning coal above the distant trees. The more intently I looked at it, the more it seemed to wobble and dance in concentric circles of varying colors. And then, as it rose higher above the sky, it became sturdier and sturdier until it stood still as if waiting for any false moves that my shadow, now safely tucked under my bare feet, might dare to make.

The setting sun was equally beautiful. As it went down it spread gorgeous streaks of gold, orange, and red along the horizon, playing games with my friends and me behind the tall mopani tree that lay in our line of view. Now one ray juts out between the branches; now seven; now half the sun itself. And, as we bent to catch sight of it below the trees, it quickly sank behind Mount Mfazomithiyo, safe from our curious eyes. Dumb sun! We would climb some taller tree and yell in our little minds: "Gotyu!" Eventually, the sun would descend too far down for us to see it, even at this height, and we would lazily make our way down, wishing we could fly up and up and see where the sun goes at night. Another day gone, we would hurry home to help lock up the cattle, goats, sheep, and chickens. Soon, supper time would be over and we would surround the kitchen fire and listen to my grandfather repeat stories of Zulu military exploits.

The white mbira player was tossing me back and forth between that distant past and the present, and the experience was disorienting. I wasn't quite sure why. The white people of my early days had not thought us as human, certainly not human enough to learn from. And we hadn't thought of them as human either. Our advantage was that we knew what they thought of us, but they seemed genuinely trapped in their own racial supremacist delusions, like three-year-olds who claim to be ten, or to be six feet tall.