Drummers have the power to allow Zimbabweans to commune with their ancestors, and none more so than those with elevated talent on the skins.
In August 1989, I visited my rural home of Mhondoro, a vast territory to the south of Harare comprising savannah grasslands, infertile, rock-strewn scrubland and dense forest. The month of August has come to be the month of the dead, when the lives of the dead, both ordinary folk and the nationalist elite, are commemorated in Zimbabwe.
“Without his being aware of it, his hands are playing invisible drums, all the time to the rhythm of the real drums now going in full up at the village.
As Darlington played, older teenagers furtively made for the eaves of the barns or hid behind the anthill on which, as blood raced, they groped and felt each other.
When Nigerian-born drummer Femi Koleoso went to visit Allen at his Paris base, part homage and part apprentice-learning-from-the-master, they had a session.
When the Shona are grasping for reasons to explain a special gift or an extraordinary ability like the one Allen, Garabha and my cousin had, sometimes they ascribe it to spirit possession or to a great ancestor.
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