The Mbira and the Dom people of Zimbabwe

By: Erin Macdonnell

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Every year since 1989 I've been going to Zimbabwe to stay with my great friend and partner Newmas Kumatsa. He lives in a small village to the North of Harare, the capital and he's a great singer and mbira player. The mbira is a musical instrument that is played inside a drum and has a very magical sound.

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He tells me stories and we sing and play mbira together with his mother, four children and friends from the village. Together we all sit around the kithchen fire, under the thatched roof blackened with smoke. This place has been my second home for some years now.

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It was the Mbira that took me to Zimbabwe. From the first moment that I heard it played by Stella Chiweshe in London I knew that I would have to learn it. Stella's playing is magic, and like all children, I love magic, and I've never grown out of it and never will............

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Newmas used to talk to me about the Dom people. A tribe who have special powers and only two toes on one foot. I used to beg him for stories about them. He said they could become invisible. He said that President Mugabe had once landed in the Dom's area by helicopter: it was just after Independence, he told them it was time they wore clothes like everyone else in Zimbabwe and became civilised. They didn't take too kindly to this, and when Mugabe returned a week or so later bringing clothes for them, they were nowhere to be seen. Newmas told me that they now keep very much to themselves, living by hunting. Sometimes they show themselves for a few days but are usually invisible.

I'd ask, " But where are they Newmas, where can we find them?" " Oh somewhere north of here" he'd say & then "But I want to meet them"

"Ah but you can't go looking for them" he would say. " you will never find them that way"

He used to say the same about elephants too, and he was right about that.

But then one day, we were on our way to Zambesi by river bus. And the bus that we were travelling in, it crashed. And so our journey changed, we went on foot hitching. And it took days, with us playing the mbira by the roadside while we waited. We'd gather a small crowd until the next lift came, and before long, we'd made plenty of friends in the area. Word got around that there was a white woman and her black husband along the road, and that they were mbira players. And so it went on like this until we reached the Zambesi River. There we rested up and ate tiger fish, we watched hippos and crocodiles, we picked loofas that grew along the river banks. It was on our way South again that one lift dropped us on a road that seemed in the middle of nowhere. Only the sound of the long grass in the wind and a little tiny shop on the horizon.

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Newmas said "Let's go there pointing to the little tiny shop. When we got there, it was owned by a cousin, who gave us a fine welcome, and we had Fantas and cokes and Rich Tea biscuits. Then when I went out on the porch, there, sitting as still and quiet as you please was a man with only two toes on his left foot. I think the other foot had a shoe on it, but in any case one foot was enough....

I went inside straight away and said " Newmas, Newmas there's one of the Dom people outside with a foot...."

"Yes, Yes" " So are we in their area"? "of course", "But why didn't you tell me"? "Because you would want to go looking for them wouldn't you, and then you would never see anything"

And it's true that the whole area has a special feel to it. Not many trees have been cut down there. It's a wild place, full of animals, and spirits too.

Before we left, Newmas' cousin showed us around. He proudly showed us his solar powered telephones, the pool of crocodiles under the bridge, and some sacred places hidden in the bush. And I did see another man with two toes. In fact he had removed his sock, this man, and he was looking at me strangely, I couldn't say exactly what his look meant, except that I didn't notice the foot right away because of the eyes, and it was only as I looked down to avoid his gaze that I saw them and there they were, looking like a fork with no middle.

I won't spoil it by telling you where they are, these magical people, because otherwise you might never find them, and that would be a shame now wouldn't it.