The Zimbabwean musician bringing the marimba and mbira to township youth
Al Jazeera
In Dzivarasekwa, Jacob Mafuleni hopes music can help break the cycle of drugs and teen pregnancy plaguing the settlement.
Harare, Zimbabwe – Dzivarasekwa, a nondescript township on the southwestern rims of Zimbabwe’s capital, copies the 1907 template of the first ghetto, Harari (now Mbare): grim, monotonous, matchbox houses laid out on grids.
Driving on its streets, one often sees skeletal silhouettes of young men – sometimes women – in a drug-induced haze who look at you with a tortured grin as they trudge along in a slow, vaguely meditative gait as if their next step is the last. Sometimes it is.
Their circumstances are the result of the drug plague that has haunted Harare for more than a decade.
Easily available on the township’s streets are cheap moonshine and the dregs of narcotics that find their way into Zimbabwe. Even diazepam, known in local slang as Blue, a drug prescribed for anxiety and seizures, is consumed.
Yet it is also in Dzivarasekwa where one finds the Tsoro Arts and Social Centre, an initiative run by the Zimbabwean musician Jacob Mafuleni, 46, from the front yard of his house.
