ABIGAIL KABANDULA
Of the many things that tether me, Zambian music returns most often. It stays with me, like a melody that lingers long after a song has ended. It is not always a clear memory, but more of a feeling, something half-heard and half-felt, absorbed before I even knew what it meant.
I grew up in Zambia’s Central Province, in a house where music was less a deliberate activity than a condition of living. My earliest encounters were incidental. The stereo would hum to life as my sister and her friends prepared for a night out. Friday and Saturday rituals that seemed, to me, both glamorous and mysterious. They played bands like Junior Mulemena Boys, and Amayenge, the music spilling into every room. Sometimes, in their rush, they would leave the cassette running, and the songs would continue long after they had gone, as if the house itself had developed a taste.
My mother, by contrast, listened with intention. She favored Masasu Band and the Glorious Band, and would call out, firmly though never impatiently, for me to rewind a tape to a particular track. There was something in those songs that spoke to her, a moral clarity or a narrative weight that felt instructive. At the time, I did not parse the lyrics so much as register their seriousness. The music, to her, was not background; it was guidance.
Without realizing it, I began carrying these songs with me. They lodged below conscious recall, becoming part of the grammar of my listening. Even now, years and continents away, I find myself singing along to a familiar chorus, sometimes in a language I do not formally speak, with a fluency that feels less learned than inherited.
Zambian music, like the country itself, has not remained still. Its evolution has been swift. I try to keep pace, often with the help of my niece, who approaches music with the urgency of discovery. Her calls arrive as dispatches: “Auntie, you have to hear this.” Through her, and through the endless scroll of social media, I have encountered newer voices, among them Chef 187, Macky 2, Mampi, JK, Danny Kaya, and Chester. Artists who navigate the delicate balance between innovation and inheritance. Songs like Kumalila Ngoma and Kumwesu feel, to me, like acts of translation. Traditional Kalindula rhythms refracted through a contemporary lens, familiar yet newly textured.
It is tempting to think of this continuity as seamless, but Zambian music has always been shaped as much by rupture as by tradition. In the years following Zambian independence, a new sound emerged from the Copperbelt, raw and electric. Zamrock, as it came to be known, was born at a moment when Zambia seemed poised between possibility and uncertainty. Under Kenneth Kaunda, the country pursued an ideology of Zambian Humanism, an effort to align socialist principles with indigenous values. For a brief period, buoyed by copper revenues and international alliances, there was a sense of collective ascent.
Zamrock captured that feeling, but it also complicated it. The music drew from Western rock. Records by Jimi Hendrix and others circulated widely, but it refused simple imitation. Instead, it folded those influences into older, deeper musical traditions. Long before amplifiers arrived in towns like Kitwe and Ndola, rural Zambians had cultivated a rich rhythmic language centered on the ngoma drum. In cultural performances such as the Tonga people’s Ngoma Buntibe, rhythm served not merely as accompaniment but as structure, organizing communal experience into sound.
This sensibility persisted, even in the most electrified contexts. Paul Ngozi, one of Zambia’s most celebrated guitarists, played with a ferocity that made his instrument feel almost alive. In songs like Bauze and Size Nine, listeners are pulled in by the sharp urgency of the electric guitar, yet beneath it, the pulse and spirit of traditional Zambian rhythms remain. The music carried not only energy but also moral teachings and social commentary that resonated deeply with ordinary people.
When Rikki Ililonga and the Musi-O-Tunya recorded Wings of Africa, they were not abandoning tradition but reimagining it for a new generation. Tracks like Zambia carry rhythms that echo traditional musical patterns, while Ililonga’s multilingual lyrics in Chinyanja, Ichibemba, and Silozi reflect a country learning to hear itself across cultural differences, shaping an identity that feels both diverse and unified. For many young Zambians, Zamrock was more than a sound, it was identity and expression. Jagari Chanda of WITCH (We Intend To Cause Havoc) once noted that learning to play the guitar felt like a rite of passage. Playing was never simply about imitation. Those riffs became a language through which young musicians expressed the struggles and contradictions of life in a newly independent country, where freedom and limitation coexisted.
The state, perhaps unexpectedly, helped sustain this experimentation. Kaunda’s requirement that the vast majority of music broadcast on national radio be locally produced created a listening public attuned to its own artists. It was a policy rooted in cultural nationalism, but it fostered a shared sonic landscape. Zambia, in a sense, began to hear itself.
By the 1990s, Zamrock had begun to fade, giving way to Kalindula music, which carried forward the spirit of traditional Zambian rhythms. Artists like Akim Simukonda helped usher Zambian music into a new era, blending local sounds with pop influences and, later, Congolese rhumba. Songs like Ichipondo Chandi and Bana Bandi introduced not just a new sound, but a new rhythm and style of dance that quickly became woven into everyday Zambian life.
What emerges from this history is not simply a lineage of genres but a layered conversation between generations, regions, and influences. The traditional emphasis on rhythm as communal expression anchors Zambian music in a pre-colonial past. Western forms, reinterpreted through local experience, introduce new modes of dissent and aspiration. Together, they produce something neither entirely inherited nor wholly imported.
I still listen, perhaps more attentively now than I did as a child. Contemporary artists continue to stretch the boundaries of what Zambian music can be, sometimes unsettling older listeners, sometimes delighting them. There are moments when the distance between tradition and innovation feels vast, even precarious. And yet, I remain optimistic. If the past is any indication, Zambian music has never been static. It has always negotiated, adapted, and reimagined itself.
What I recognize, listening now, is the same undercurrent that first reached me through a half-forgotten cassette tape. A rhythm that carries memory forward, even as it makes room for something new.
The author holds joint fellowship appointments at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver and University of Edinburgh Law School.
