Morning Thanks--Nombuntu

Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia. If you're old enough to remember, the name change meant a great deal about how the country was ruled, but very little with respect to human suffering. When Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, it was ruled by a white minority so small that its only means of governing was by shedding blood. In 1960, 300,000 whites ruled eight million blacks--not only a recipe for disaster, the white colonial government was one.

When, in February of 1980, after endless civil wars, a school teacher named Robert Mugabe, a man who had embraced Marxism and become a true revolutionary in colonial Rhodesia, was named Prime Minister, his ZANU party took control of a government finally purged of white-minority rule. For almost forty years, Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe--the new name--just as ruthlessly as any white predecessor, even though very soon many of the country's black populace feared and hated him. He became, it seemed, their President-for-life. 

Just last year, about this time, Mugabe, 94 years old and determined to stay in power, sacked his first vice-president and thereby brought on impeachment proceedings from his majority opposition. When he correctly read situation, he resigned after having secured some richly undeserved clemency for the horrors he'd committed through his almost forty years in power.

For more than a century, the story of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has been rife with horror, no matter who led the government. Widespread starvation has been a constant. The country's bountiful natural resources have been cut off at the knees. The future of tourism is in question: who wants to visit a country where all too regularly bodies are dug up where no one knew they were buried? For more than a century, people have simply disappeared.

That's what I know about Zimbabwe. That's just about what any North American my age can remember: for more than a century it's been a wild and angry place, human rights largely non-existent. 

Last night, five Zimbabwean women who call themselves Nobuntu walked out on stage at the Northwestern Chapel and offered a dozen or so harmonies nurtured from Zimbabwian soil. Most of what they sang was traditional. What wasn't was rooted there anyway. 

And it was beautiful. I'm doubtful any one in the audience was familiar was anything they sang, save a strikingly African version of "Amazing Grace." Otherwise, what they offered the audience was totally foreign, drawn from a place very few Americans know anything about. What they offered was beauty, plain and simple, the whole group an ambassadorship of music totally their own drawn from a country that has known little but conflict.

It's always spiritually refreshing to know that somehow, amid all the grief and sadness, ordinary people can sing, can create art and music that delivers a kind of joy very little else can bring. A couple times during the concert, Nobuntu tried to get an almost all-white, North American audience to sing along, not with words so much as sound. Somehow, they were remarkably successful. 

But their crowning achievement was simply in charming an audience who'd never heard an all-woman Zimbabwean a cappella group perform lilting harmonies drawn from homelands where, for more than a century, peace and beauty haven't been easy to come by. 

They were themselves a gift, for which, this morning, I'm thankful.