About the Music

The Bellingham Community Marimba Project strives to share the beautiful traditional and contemporary music of Zimbabwe in an education-focused manner. This traditional music (played mostly on mbira) dates back several centuries. The music of the mbira serves as a foundation for much of the music played on marimba.

In the late 19th century, Zimbabwe was taken over by British 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 in Bulawayo came up with the idea of building an instrument that was identifiably African and could execute both African and Western music alike; 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, an arrangement was made for Maraire to attend the Kwanongoma College. There, he would complete a teacher training program, after which he was invited to lecture at UW. Upon his arrival in 1968, he gained a following of mbira students (nyunga nyunga) and within a few years had the first set of marimbas shipped to Seattle from Kwanongoma College. He would then 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, whose students would eventually disperse the presence of Zimbabwean marimba music across the States. Many would go on to start their own bands and programs across the U.S., and by the 1990s, the Zimbabwean Music Festival was established in the PNW to celebrate Zimbabwean music, ultimately uniting a unique community of music enthusiasts.

The Zimbabwean Music Festival is still going strong today. Visit zimfest.org to find out more about the festival!