Ndebele Songs

Many music lovers will be familiar with the isicathamiya style of singing, thanks to southern African groups such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Black Umfolosi. Insingizi offer a refreshing and entirely different style. A rudimentary understanding of the origins of the Ndebele people may be of help in appreciating fully the significance of the album. A group of Zulus fled Zululand, having rebelled against Tshaka (sometimes Chaka or Shaka), starting their journey northward. Along the way they acquired the name mandelele (men of tall shields) from other tribes, and eventually settled in what is now Zimbabwe. Unsurprisingly, some of the traditional songs here are suffused with the angst of an exiled people pining for a world left behind and a king lost on arrival in a foreign land: it’s in this spirit that the Ndebele traditional song of invocation takes root.

This album’s accomplishment is its seamless melding together of the Ndebele traditional song, the church hymn and the revolutionary songs of the guerrilla armies. It sums up the evolution of this style of a capella singing over time: first, as traditional art of incantation, then as gospel song and finally as agency of the morale-boosting paean of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, one of the guerrilla armies. Some of the songs are chants whose power lies in the charged harmonies that only a crowd at a Ndebele rite is capable of delivering. These harmonies must be challenging to reproduce in a studio. Insingizi do a fine job.