Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Obituary: Rise Kagona (1960-2024)
The joyous, spiralling guitar playing of Rise Kagona helped to make the jit jive of the Bhundu Boys one of the glories of the 1980s world music boom.
Photo by Zul Bhatia (Courtesy of Andy Cooke)
The son of a tribal chief, he was born in Nyasaland (now Malawi) but grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where his parents moved when he was two. He formed the Bhundu Boys with lead singer Biggie Tembo in 1980, the year Zimbabwe freed itself from minority white rule and named the band in honour of the freedom fighters who had fought for independence.
For the next five years, the Bhundu Boys played the beer halls of Harare and scored a string of domestic hits. They might have remained a purely local phenomenon were it not for Margaret Thatcher whose UK government, in a rare moment of enlightenment, created the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which provided funding for unemployed people to start their own businesses.
Owen Elias and Doug Veitch used the scheme to form a label called Discafrique Records and headed to Harare in search of artists to sign. They discovered Kagona and the Bhundu Boys and released a four-track EP in 1985 that was enthusiastically played on BBC Radio One by Andy Kershaw, who claimed that hearing Kagona’s guitar changed his life, and John Peel, who was so moved the first time he heard the Bhundu Boys that he burst into tears.
Two albums on Discafrique followed, and Elias and Veitch brought the group to Britain for their first tour in 1986. They settled in the UK, supported Madonna at Wembley Stadium over three nights in 1987 and signed with Warner Brothers, for whom they recorded the albums True Jit (1987) and Pamberi (1989).
Sadly, the band then fell apart. Tembo left in 1990 and committed suicide five years later, while three members died of AIDS. Kagona’s hot-headedness didn’t help, either. “Back in those days, I didn’t talk much, I spoke with my fist,” he admitted. “If you had a problem with me, I would ask you to step outside.”
He struggled on with a revamped Bhundu Boys until 2000 and later settled in Edinburgh, where he formed Rise Kagona & The Jit Jive Band. In recent years, he fell on hard times and a crowd-funding appeal was organised to fly his body to Zimbabwe for burial. Elvis Costello was among those who donated.
‘I live for pleasure… Sing and dance at my funeral,’ Kagona sang on his composition ‘Hupenyu Hwangu’, one of the standout tracks on the Bhundu Boys’s first Discafrique album.
The pleasure his unique style of guitar playing brought to the world was immense, and the music he made with the Bhundu Boys will remain a joy forever.
