Bira reMbira Honours Ambuya Stella Chiweshe: The Woman Who Kept the Mbira Alive
Today in Harare, a whole free festival of mbira gathers under one name. It is right that it does. She carried a sacred instrument through the colonial night — when even to hold an mbira could bring the police — and kept a sound older than a thousand years until a free generation could take it up. This is not a funeral. It is proof that cultural restoration is winning.
Let us begin with the gathering, because that is where the honour is being paid. Bira reMbira — “the bira of the mbira” — is a festival built to celebrate the instrument at the very heart of our spiritual life. Today, Friday 25 September 2026, it holds its third edition at Glamis Arena, Harare Showgrounds: entry free, opening at 10am and running through to pungwe, the all-night vigil. And this year the whole gathering carries a special tribute to one person: Ambuya Stella Rambisai Chiweshe. When I heard, my heart was full. To watch a free Zimbabwe throw a festival in her name — for the very music a colonial government once tried to erase — is to watch a long, hard night finally turn to morning.
I write this not as a distant admirer but as one who knew her. My connection with Ambuya began behind a camera, and it grew, over years, into many long conversations. So this is a granddaughter of the tradition honouring one of its mothers — and a teaching, too, because to honour her properly, some things must be said correctly, in our own voice, the way the world has rarely bothered to get right. The Tete Getty Research Institute (TGRI) exists for exactly this: to tell our story ourselves.
What a Bira Is — and Why a Whole Festival Bears Its Name
A bira is not entertainment. It is a ceremony — an all-night gathering where families call on the vadzimu, the ancestors, through the mbira dzavadzimu, “the mbira of the ancestors.” The players play in interlocking cycles until dawn; the hosho shake the pulse; the people sing, dance and enter communion with those who came before. It is living heritage, practised now, in the present tense — not a museum piece. Bira reMbira the festival takes that sacred form and lifts it into a national celebration, so that the instrument once driven underground is now honoured in the open, by the young and the old together.
Held under the Ministry of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture, and carried by promoters and partners including Chipaz Promotions, Jive and Mangwenya Music World, this year’s Bira runs a great river of custodians — from Sekuru Mushore Mbira Custodians, Ambuya Mavhu Mbira Group, Nzombehuru Mbira Ensemble, Chishawasha Nhare Mbira Group and Izwi reMhondoro, to Victor Kunonga, Diana Samkange, Andy Muridzo, Feli Nandi, Chikwata 263 and dozens more. There is a special tribute segment for Ambuya Stella — with schools and cultural groups performing a tribute theme song, and a moving act of the mbira’s global family in a tribute performance by Indré Jurgelevičiūtė, a Lithuanian singer and kanklės player. And there, in the line-up, is a name close to my own heart: Ntswai Ntswai Arts, of Mutare — but more on them shortly.
“Ambuya” Is Not About Age — It Is a Spiritual Standing
Before we speak of her life, let us settle a thing the world gets wrong. “Ambuya” is not a word for an old woman. It is a title of spiritual standing — given to one upon whom an ancestral spirit rests, one who carries or serves the vadzimu, a medium or a keeper of the sacred. To call Stella Chiweshe “Ambuya” is not a remark about her years. It is a recognition of what moved through her when she played. She was Ambuya long before she was old — because the spirit, not the calendar, confers the name.
She was born on 8 July 1946 at Mujumi Village, Mhondoro. She learned the mbira dzavadzimu between 1966 and 1969 — taught at last by her great-uncle after teacher upon teacher had refused her — and she did it against two walls at once. The first was the colonial wall: the ceremonies were suppressed, the sound branded heathen, the mission school taught children to fear it. The second was the wall raised against women: mbira was kept for men, and a girl who wished to learn was shamed for it. She climbed both. Her 1974 single Kasahwa became one of the recordings that carried mbira into the modern age; she went on to form her band The Earthquake, to join the National Dance Company, and to carry the mbira to stages across the world, living for many years in Germany while never letting go of the tradition’s spiritual root. She returned home, and she passed on 20 January 2023. The world’s press called her “the Queen of Mbira.” We honour her, more truly, as Ambuya — Chihera, Mhofu.
Her Songs Were Lessons — Especially on Through Mbira
To love Ambuya Stella’s music is to be taught by it. Her songs are not only beautiful; they carry counsel, warning, history and comfort. My own favourite album is Through Mbira — I return to it again and again — and its songs are a small university of our ways. Let me share a few, and what they teach.
This is what the world’s “world-music” label could never capture: that these were never just songs. They were memory, law, comfort and covenant, passed the way our knowledge has always passed — by ear, by heart, from one generation to the next.
The Day My Connection With Ambuya Began
My bond with Ambuya Stella began behind a camera. I was the official photographer at an event she graced in the United Kingdom, and something passed between us that day that did not end when the event did. In the years that followed — while she lived abroad and I in the diaspora — we stayed close through many long conversations over WhatsApp, talking about our people, our traditions, and who we are, right up until she passed. Those talks were a gift I will carry for the rest of my life. The photographs below are from that day our paths first crossed.
These photographs are offered freely under a fair-use policy on the condition that the copyright line © Getty Musiiwa Photography is displayed with each image. The full album is available here: facebook.com/share/19iFjdcSkG.
Please note, for the collage specifically: fair use extends only to the images of Ambuya Stella Chiweshe herself. Images within the collage in which other people appear may not be reused. Kindly use only the frames showing Ambuya Stella.
Ntswai Ntswai Arts — Mutare’s Own, Holding the Line
And here is why my heart lifts to see them on that Harare stage today. Ntswai Ntswai Arts, of Dangamvura, Mutare, is a traditional arts crew I have walked alongside and supported for many years — a home for mbira, marimba, hosho, ngoma and nhekwe, founded by Sir Lino Piloto and carrying artists like Olinda Chakandinakira (Ola 7). They are exactly the kind of custodians this whole story is about: not famous names chasing charts, but a community keeping the instruments, the songs and the ceremonies alive in their own town, teaching the next child to play.
When a crew like Ntswai Ntswai shares a bill with the country’s biggest names in a national tribute to Ambuya Stella, you are watching the tradition do what it has always done — pass, hand to hand, from the elders to the young, from the great medium to the hometown teacher. That is the whole point. Mbira was never meant to live in one great person alone. It lives because ordinary custodians, in Dangamvura and a thousand places like it, refuse to let it die.
Cultural Restoration Is Winning
This Bira is, to me, a dream of the ancestors made real. Think of the distance travelled: from an instrument hunted and shamed, its ceremonies banned, its mediums hanged — to a free nation filling an arena, for free, to honour it. That is not a small thing. It is a battle of the mind being won. The colonisation of our spirit tried to make us ashamed of our own sound. Today’s gathering is a whole people refusing that shame, out loud, together.
So this platform says thank you — to Ambuya Stella, and to every keeper of the flame: the mbira makers, the hosho players, the grandmothers who sang the songs over cooking fires, the crews like Ntswai Ntswai, the families who held bira in secret and now hold it in the open. You kept the line unbroken. Because of you, a child born free today will grow up knowing the sound of her own ancestors. That is the victory. That is what today’s Bira reMbira truly celebrates.
Famba Zvakanaka, Chihera
I have carried Ambuya Stella in my heart for many years — from the day I first photographed her, through every long conversation that followed, to the day we lost her. And what I feel, watching a free Zimbabwe honour her today, is not only grief. It is triumph. She took a sound they tried to bury and she carried it into the light, across oceans, into the ears of the world, and home again — and now our own nation gathers, freely, to say her name. She did not just play the mbira. She kept a door open between us and our ancestors when powerful people were trying to nail it shut.
To honour her fully, we honour her the way our tradition does — not with a foreign crown, but with her totem, her real and lasting name. She was Chihera, of the Mhofu, the eland — a house of grace, endurance and quiet strength. So let us send her the way an Ambuya should be sent: with praise, with gratitude, and with the promise that the sound she guarded will never again be silenced. Tovera Mudzimu Dzoka.
Ziwewera, Museyamwa,
VaHera, Ziendanetyaka, Nyakudya,
Aiwa, maita Mhukahuru.
Zvaonekwa, Chihera — famba zvakanaka, Ambuya.
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