Long before Mokoomba were playing WOMAD, Roskilde and the Kennedy Center, they were six teenagers in Chinotimba township, Victoria Falls, gathering after school in the home of a local musician who let them near his equipment.
Six friends, one neighbourhood
Mokoomba's members grew up together, attended the same schools, and started jamming informally with the help of elder local musician Alfred Mjimba, who opened up his instruments to the group. The band formalised into a working outfit around 2007, built from the start on that same friendship rather than a formal audition process.
Their name says as much about where they're from as their sound does. Guitarist Trustworth Samende has explained that "Mokoomba" is a Tonga word expressing deep respect for the Zambezi River as the source of life, a fitting name for a band raised within sight of Victoria Falls.
A deliberate break from the expected sound
Where a lot of Zimbabwean acts lean on the country's classic mbira and marimba traditions, Mokoomba made an early, conscious choice to go a different way, building their sound on Tonga rhythms fused with Congolese soukous, funk, reggae and even Latin influences. Tonga is a minority language within Zimbabwe, and the band sings largely in it alongside Luvale, Nyanja, Ndebele, Shona and English, a rare global platform for a language that doesn't usually get one.
Their break came through Music Crossroads, a youth music programme. Winning the national contest in 2008 sent them to represent Zimbabwe in Malawi, which led directly to a recording deal and their first tour of Europe.
From township jam sessions to a global stage
Their 2011 debut album Rising Tide, produced with Ivorian bassist Manu Gallo, was described by Afropop Worldwide as "an A+ international debut from a band nobody saw coming." Since then, Mokoomba has played more than 40 countries and some of the biggest stages in world music, including WOMAD, Sziget, North Sea Jazz, SXSW, Lollapalooza Berlin and the Apollo Theater, and picked up the Songlines Best Newcomer award in 2013, a Songlines Top of the World Album honour in 2017, and induction into Afropop Worldwide's Hall of Fame in 2018.
Bassist Abundance Mutori has described their writing process as genuinely collective: "All ideas are really welcome, everybody brings his own ideas, then we just try to find a way how best we can put it together." That collaborative instinct, formed in a Victoria Falls living room, has carried through every stage since, including their self-produced 2022 pandemic album Tusona: Tracings in the Sand, recorded entirely DIY, and a 2024 tour that took them back through the United States and the UK.
Sources
- Mokoomba, Wikipedia
- Mokoomba: On The Rise, Music in Africa
- Mokoomba: Rising Tide, Afropop Worldwide
- Mokoomba: The Band from Victoria Falls, Milwaukee Courier
- Mokoomba Discuss the Origins of Their Sound, Band on the Wall
Photo by Shawn Miller, Library of Congress, Mokoomba performing at a Homegrown Concert Series event, 2019, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
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