It’s an incredible story, and I highly recommend you read it.
There’s your review of Tony ‘Chief’ Chihota’s The Beginning, for those of you who can’t be bothered to read the rest of this review.
No, scratch that: read the rest of this, I implore you. It would be disingenuous of me to say what I’m about to say next while conceding to you the option to not read.
We have a literary crisis in Zimbabwe. Not a literacy crisis; we sure CAN read and, at least on a basic level, write (so much so that this is the ONE thing we’ve continued to lord over our African neighbors; even as they’ve overtaken us in much else…I digress.) There is a sense, however, that we DON’T read and, just as critically, write as much as we should. There are, I theorize, several reasons for these twin dynamics: a global decline in reading culture all-round due to overstimulation and shortened attention spans, the prohibitive cost of publishing and, conversely, the meagre profits (if any) from written works, etc. Whatever the reason is, this dearth in literary exertion shows its ugly head in suboptimal pass rates, lackluster journalism compared to yesteryear, and a baffling lack of basic comprehension by the social media masses. As somebody who researches popular histories (music etc), the lack of easily accessible records, especially pre 21st century, is frustrating! Try finding annual charts, album estimates, or even release dates for music from the 80s and 90s: It’s bad.
We need to read more.
We need to write more. More children’s books. More records. More fiction. And, especially relevant to this review, more memoirs.
With The Beginning, Chihota perhaps provides us an unironically apt place to begin this journey.
The book chronicles life,from being born in Tanzania to a freedom fighter dad and Russian mother, to then moving to Harare and being one of the first non-white families to live in their suburb, to being sent to Russia for high school, and eventually coming back and co-founding the pioneering hip-hop group A Peace of Ebony, to entering and exiting the drug game and…well, I don’t wanna spoil it all for you, but through to the present moment; where he appears to be in a good place.
The general populace struggles to view rappers as being particularly intellectual. This is despite the fact that they (the good ones, at least) are wordsmiths, rhythmically crafting sentiments and channeling topics that the average person observes and is unable to condense, and authors take entire books to describe- and distill them to 16-bar, three-verse sermons. But because traditional societies tend to be more socially conservative and, in a space where “zvemagitare” was already frowned upon, the dreadlocked, baggy-fit aesthetic and profanity-laced lyrics image would be an aberration. Importantly, it sits outside our general imagining on what “intelligent” looks like. (it doesn’t help that some more visible artists, indeed, living up to this stigma)
And you would be wrong; particularly about Tony Chihota.
I should know better, and I do. But the subconscious will do subconscious things: so when I bought the book, and started to read it, I expected perhaps a hodgepodge of anecdotes about how A Peace of Ebony came up and eventually fell apart, with some hi-jinx and shenanigans therein. If I can be bluntly honest, I had caught wind of the veteran MC’s struggles with the bottle and other stuff (something he talks about in detail in the book) throughout the 2010s from the rumor-mill, and I figured this was last-dash, nostalgia-bating cash-in to secure a few dollars for the next one or two.
And I was wrong. I’m sorry Tony.
The book is an excellent, insightful, and surprisingly vulnerable read. There are five ways in which it triumphs that I would like to draw attention to.
- It is a work of History
With less-nuanced memoirs/autobiographies, the temptation is to self-indulge, and only self-indulge. That, is after all, the very definition of such. So you tell stories about your life experiences. What separates the good ones from the great ones, however, is a commitment to not only describing these experiences, but the context that informs them as well. In that regard, Chihota does an excellent job of weaving the history of space and time into his life story.
In talking about his birthplace, Tanzania, he writes “Home of the Renowned Maasai warriors and the majestic Mt. Kilimanjaro, Tanzania was also a place of refuge for the families of African revolutionaries…” He could have just said I was born in Tanzania then came to Zim at some point; but no: he tells us what this place is, and how he had ended up there. He talks about 1980s Zimbabwe, “the breadbasket of Africa” in such detail that it is likely to induce bitter nostalgia for those who were there, and yearning for those who missed it. In describing his move to Russia, he describes the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War, and how children of freedom fighters from countries aligned with the Soviet Union had access to schools over there, and situates his return to ZImbabwe within the context of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Even as his career as a rapstar got going in South Africa in the early 90s, he paints a lucid picture of the Apartheid system, especially after he got arrested for a stint.
Thus, the book works as somewhat of a history text. (so much so that I, who works as a history teacher when I’m not rambling about muis, found myself saying “wow; that’s news to me!” once or twice, and will be incorporating some of his details in my classes next semester: for example, did you know there’s a Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow!?)
- It is the story of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll”
If the previous point explains ways in which the book works as a history/social studies text, this one argues that it works as an action-packed movie as well.
While the Western world has done a stellar job of giving us “the story behind the story” when it comes to our favorite artists, we still lag somewhat behind; unless you are plugged into the grapevine, or something makes the news; most of us don’t know the skinny about our stars’ lives in the periphery of their limelight (and that’s amplified for artists whose heyday was pre-social media.)
Chihota doesn’t only tell you the stories behind the story; he takes you there. The studio, the groupies, the drug dealing, the strip club, the blonde bombshells he shacked up with and the shady foreigners sticking guns in his ribs; the prison gangs, and the almost-fights with American hip-hop acts. If the history doesn’t interest you, and the heartstrings aren’t there for the pulling when he talks about his people (see #4 and #5), you’re going to want to at least read it for these riveting anecdotes!
- It is a story of the music
I suspect that this may be what most readers would have come for, and the author does a good job of answering such questions as “how did A Peace of Ebony come together?” “What heights did they hit and how?” and “Whatever happened to them? It also fundamentally answers the broader questions: “Where does the story of Hip-hop in Zimbabwe begin?”
As stated earlier, Zimbabwe’s documentation of its musical history still leaves a lot to be desired. We need both the quantitative (i.e release dates, album sales, chart positions etc) and the qualitative (the people and spaces who made it happen and the stories around them.) The Beginning is a solid contribution to the latter, as we trace back to the first rap tape Tony was ever gifted as a primary student (Escape by the group WHODINI) to the first rap he ever wrote, to meeting with Metaphysics, and the cipher at which they discovered Chiwoniso, to getting signed, charting, being played on BBC, being backdoored by label executives, sharing stages with Brenda Fassie and The Lost Boyz etc.
We needed that. We got that.
- It is the story of community
This may well have been an intentional literary device. Or, as I’m more apt to believe, Tony didn’t even realize he was doing this—it just shines through because that’s just the man he is.
At every turn of the story, he spends as much time, if not more, on describing who was in his community than he does about himself. Indeed, after reading this, I know in some decent detail his family tree (and, for many of them, their personalities), from his Russian grandparents, to his Father and uncles, his relationship with Mom and its highs and lows, his stepdad, his siblings and where they currently live and how many kids they have; and he does this without being formulaic or mechanical (i.e not just listing them categorically, but introducing them by way of story.) I know all the countries that his classmates in Russia came from; his bandmates and what they were particularly good at; his seedy underworld friends and what they looked like, their accents and specialty; I can name half a dozen of the people he met in prison and which ones were the “good guys”; I know that Brett has a son named Dan and they play in a five-aside team at their church.
Guys, this book is not that long, and it’s definitely a story about Tony’s life; so the fact that he was able to communicate that much about everyone else is, in itself, a testament to Ubuntu: he is/was because they are/were—for better or worse. When he spoke about classmates and bandmates, those were his people. When he spoke about the underbelly, the prison and the street dwellers with whom he shared illicit juice; those too were his people. When he talks about his family and church folks, would you believe it, those too were/are his people.
The consummate community man, telling the consummate community story.
- It is the story of a man.
This may sound like an empty truism. It is, after all, a memoir; so of course it is the story of a man.
But beyond that, you travel with the man; from before he was born, with the Chimurenga and Cold War politics that facilitated his parents meeting, to the suburban life at a time when that was still groundbreaking, to losing a parent early on and learning to fight (emotionally and physically, to success, broken promises, and throwing it all away before beginning the rebuild.
I don’t want to spoil the book’s ending, because I desire for you to still read it. But I’ll finish my reflection thus:
As I read the last two or three (very short) chapters, at 1am on New Year’s Day, no less, I found myself getting teary-eyed. It may have just been the occasion (or the fact that I was feeling nice off some wikkid liquid.) Then I put it down when I finished.
Throughout the holiday season, I had been traveling with my mother, so i was sharing with her some of the (more ‘safe’ #IYKYK) anecdotes from the book with her. So the following day, as I told her I was done, I didn’t just share the ending with her; I sat her down and read the last three chapters verbatim; somebody around me had to hear how this story ends (for now.) Again, I found myself on the verge of tears. It was that good. She got emotional too.
An unmatched beginning to the year.
Congratulations on a life well-lived, a story well-told, and a future well-envisioned.
All the best, Tony.
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