This is a love song, set to three chords and the truth. It is the story of a guitar, standing in front of a mbira, asking it to love punk. It is the story of Chikwata 263, Zimbabwe’s first mbira punk band.

This story echoes across generations, reverberating through the metallic buzz of the mbira, this analogue telephone to the ancestors, raising the frequency of meeting points and miscegenation at the junction of the sacred and the secular. It is the sound of music returning home, swimming upstream with a shimmering melodicism to the headwaters. The song of the deeptime hum of mystery in this place, Zimbabwe. Strange vibrations.

Unrepeatable, ungovernable, virtually unheard of outside of the only country where such an artistic experiment might ever have taken place, at a certain time, at a certain place, Chikwata 263 is Zimbabwean hope and optimism transmogrified through mukwa and metal, and howled at full volume.

In its original line-up—Tomás Lutuli Brickhill, “Hectic” Hector Rufaro Mugani, Blessing “Bled” Chimanga and Ray “Ray” Mupfumira—Chikwata 263 bristled with punk bravado. Brazen guttersnipes who were cheeky enough to try this shit,daring to hold up a cracked mirror refraction of a beautiful, broken place, and sincere enough to pull it off.

“From the beginning, Chikwata never played by the book, because we were breaking all the laws,” Ray tells me. “Mixing mbira and punk. We broke all the laws.”

We’re sitting on the lawn behind a suburban restaurant in Harare, just before Christmas in 2021, and the Chikwata boys are taking a breather during a long day spent driving around in Ray’s battered pick-up truck, volunteering to hand out food parcels to the homeless and the hungry of the city in the midst of a pandemic that has made the hard times even harder.

“So you’re punks, have you heard of The Ramones?” one of the other volunteers asks him.

“Have they heard of us?” Ray shoots back, not missing a beat.