The legend that was Mjura
When I first met Mjura Mkandawire (1926 – 2013) in the 1980s, he came across to me as a humble, fatherly and well-mannered personality. I was then a student in Zomba. Mjura had come to Zomba to record our choral group for MBC’s A Chorus for Sunday. After recording one song, he politely suggested that we should retake it because the tenor was “slightly shy.”
What I did not know then was that this humble, fatherly and well-mannered individual was actually larger than life when it came to creativity: a playwright, a music composer, a teacher, a presenter, an organiser, all rolled into one.
This article will focus on Mjura’s prowess as a music composer of international repute.
A prophet is not honoured at home, so the saying goes. This is truer for Mjura than it probably is for any other Malawian. While he has enjoyed little recognition at home, further afield, for example in Germany, choral groups have rehearsed and performed his music—and in Chitumbuka. This is a true testimony to the fact that music knows no language barriers.
Every one of his compositions was a classic. Examples are Kunali John Chilembwe, Pakupoka Wanangwa, Kuyamwitsa Kwa Mawele Ana and multitude of choral pieces.
At a special function organised by the Blantyre Baptist Church to honour Mjura, one of the speakers, Mtebeti Wambali Mkandawire, explained that music was the final product of work that goes on behind the scenes. It is like a building project, which culminates in a structure that is really the final manifestation of the toils of an architect.
Composing is synonymous with designing a building in the above analogy. While an architect uses drawing paper and, these days, computer aids such as Autocad, a musician uses notation to do his/her compositions. Many Malawians play music by the ear; a methodology which, in my view, deprives Malawian music of its richness and wholesomeness. This is the only country in the world where music reading is not taken seriously. Michael Jackson, probably the greatest pop star of all time, used to write his music using notation. His famous piece titled We Are The World was written with all the necessary notation and distributed to various artists such as Cyndi Lauper and Lionel Richie, who would separately study and rehearse it in preparation for an eventual joint performance.
And Mjura was not a novice at music writing. When I talk about music writing, I do not mean writing song words. Song words are poetry. Mjura went beyond words. I need to give an illustration to make this clear. In 1873, a Chicag-based lawyer, Horatio Spafford, wrote a touching poem as he passed through the spot where his four daughters had perished in a marine accident a few days previously. He subsequently passed his poem on to a musician known as Phillip Bliss, who set it to music, writing the music to Spafford’s lyrics, thereby creating one of the best known hymns of all time, When Peace Like A River.
During the celebration of Mjura’s life, Luscious Chikuni, who had worked with Mjura at MBC, told the audience that when he (Luscious) wrote the John Chilembwe play in the 1970s, he needed a piece of music that would carry the message across to the masses. He asked Mjura to work on one. Two hours later, Mjura came back with a piece, complete with words and music. That was the birth of the classic Kunali John Chilembwe.
Mjura had his collection of eight compositions published by the Choral Workshop Publications in 1991. All the pieces were in staff notation with guitar chords shown above each line.
What is more, Mjura presided over the formation of the first band to widely use electronic instruments in Malawi, the MBC Band. This he did following a donation of an assortment of instruments from the Federal Republic of Germany. MBC Band turned out to be the cradle of all modern music in Malawi. At its peak, the band toured Southern Rhodesia at the suggestion of a Rhodesian businessperson who paid all the costs and suggested that the group should recruit female vocalists to perform Simanjemanje music. Mjura named the female vocalists The Chichiri Queens. They performed hits like Polepole, Kunja Kwazizira, Atsikana a kwa Chitedze and others with the backing of MBC Band.
–The author is a government printer.
