About the Music

The Bellingham Community Marimba Project strives to share the beautiful traditional and contemporary music of Zimbabwe in an education-focused manner. The traditional music dates back several centuries, primarily the music of the mbira, the instrument the music originates from.

In the late 19th century, Zimbabwe was taken over by European colonial powers, at which time Shona religious practices, including mbira music, was treated as heresy, and was therefore strongly discouraged in society.

In the 1950s, there was fear of traditional music dying out. A couple of professors at the Kwanongoma College of Music came up with the idea of building an instrument that could thrive playing Western music, as well as traditional music; thus the Kwanongoma Marimba was born.

In the 1960s, Dumisani Maraire, a young mbira and marimba player, was becoming a very active musician. After his original music for a play impressed a visiting Ethnomusicology professor from the University of Washington, it was arranged for Maraire to attend the Kwanongoma College, and was thereafter invited to lecture at UW by the professor. Upon his arrival in 1968, he gained a following of mbira students (primarily the nyunga nyunga type), and within a few years had the first set of marimbas shipped to Seattle from Kwanongoma College to start the first American-based marimba band, Dumi and the Minanzi Marimba Ensemble.

The band took Seattle by storm, holding weekly residencies at the hottest music clubs in town, and toured nationally before the band’s end in 1978. Dumi would go on to have other bands in Seattle, of which students would eventually move on in their lives to other places that did not have Zimbabwean marimba bands. Many would go on to start their own bands and programs across the U.S., and by the 1990s, bands were spread all across the United States.

Many of Maraire’s students went on to establish the Zimbabwean Music Festival, which annually celebrates this wonderful music, bringing together a vast majority of the Zimbabwean-music community across the U.S., primarily held in the Pacific Northwest.