People told her the mbira was not for women. Stella Chiweshe heard the criticism from men and women alike when she began playing the thumb piano in Zimbabwe in the 1960s. She kept playing for six decades, took the instrument to stages across Europe and became known simply as the mbira queen.
Mhondoro
Chiweshe was born in July 1946 in Mhondoro, in the Mashonaland region of what was then Southern Rhodesia. She grew up in a Shona community where the mbira was central to ceremonies that connect the living with their ancestors.
The mbira
The mbira dzavadzimu, the “mbira of the ancestors”, is an instrument of metal keys mounted on a wooden board and often placed inside a gourd resonator. It is played with the thumbs and a finger, producing interlocking, hypnotic patterns. In Shona tradition it is used in bira ceremonies, all-night rituals in which spirit mediums communicate with ancestors.
Breaking a barrier
Mbira playing was mostly a male role. Chiweshe’s decision to learn it, and to play it in public, challenged that custom. She has described feeling a spiritual calling to the instrument, a calling she would not ignore.
Under colonial rule
In colonial Rhodesia, traditional religious practices were discouraged by missionaries and the state. Playing the mbira was itself a statement about African identity. Chiweshe’s music became associated with cultural resistance.
Recording career
Her recording career began in the 1970s. After Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, she joined the National Dance Company of Zimbabwe. Her first international album, Ambuya?, came out in 1987 and introduced her music to audiences abroad.
Germany and the world
Chiweshe spent much of her later life between Zimbabwe and Germany, performing at world music festivals across Europe. She often combined the mbira with other instruments and electric bands, while keeping its spiritual role at the centre.
Teaching
She founded a centre to preserve traditional Zimbabwean music and culture, and she taught many students, including women who followed her example.
Spirit and stage
Chiweshe never treated the concert stage and the ceremony as separate worlds. She often spoke of her music as a spiritual practice, and she performed in the dress of a spirit medium, with beads and cloth that carried meaning in Shona tradition. European audiences who came for world music heard something closer to a ceremony than a show. That approach drew criticism from some Christians in Zimbabwe, who saw the mbira as tied to ancestral religion. Chiweshe accepted the connection openly. For her, the instrument’s power lay precisely in its link to the ancestors, and she refused to strip that away to make it more acceptable.
Her death
Stella Chiweshe died on 20 January 2023. Tributes described her as a pioneer and a rebel. The instrument women were told to leave alone now has many female players in Zimbabwe and beyond. Chiweshe was the first to make that impossible to ignore.
