Cosmas Magaya

1953-2020

Mbira music first captivated Cosmas Magaya as a child in his rural home in Mhondoro, Zimbabwe, where he heard exceptional mbira performers at Shona religious ceremonies honoring the ancestors. Ernest Chivhanga, his elder cousin and first teacher nurtured his prodigious talent, and taught him the fundamentals of mbira playing. Magaya initially performed and recorded with his family’s mbira ensemble Mhuri yekwaMagaya. Later, he joined the renowned ensemble Mhuri yekwaRwizi led by his elder cousin Hakurotwi Mude.

In 1971, he met Paul Berliner, then a graduate student carrying out field research in Zimbabwe, and became one of Berliner’s principal teachers and research assistants. (Magaya and Berliner would go on to become research associates and fellow performers.) While pursuing a career in Zimbabwe’s dairy industry in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, he taught briefly at the Kwanongoma College of Music in Bulawayo, and increasingly shifted the focus of his professional life to music. After Zimbabwe’s independence, Magaya became a distinguished cultural ambassador, performing abroad with Mhuri yekwaRwizi in North America, England, and Europe. In 1999 he co-led the US tour of The Zimbabwe Group Leaders Mbira Ensemble. Over the decades, he acquired an international reputation as an inspired mbira teacher. In Zimbabwe, as well as America, Canada, England, and Norway, he has participated in residencies at colleges and universities, secondary schools, community cultural centers, museums, music festivals, and mbira camps.

Committed to community work, he has served as Head of his village in Mhondoro, and as the Zimbabwean Program Director for Nhimbe for Progress, a non-profit organization for development projects in Zimbabwe’s rural areas. He is also engaged with Humwe, an evolving cultural arts and education center in Mhondoro dedicated to Magaya’s musical legacy. Among other subjects, Humwe teaches traditional Zimbabwean music to young people, with an emphasis on mbira and marimba.

On July 10, 2020, Cosmas was taken by covid-19 at the age of 66. He was laid to rest beside his first wife, Joyce Zinyengere, at Magaya village. A few months earlier, having completed a pass through The Art of Mbira–and knowing that Mbira’s Restless Dance would soon follow–he called me from his village. “We’re at the mountain top at last,” he said.

The lion spirit has claimed its bull. We mourn his passing.