“How do you explain falling in love?” asks Erica Azim. “In a certain way, it’s an impossible question.”
For more than half a century, Azim has been living inside that impossibility. Her devotion to mbira, the sacred music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, and to the thumb piano–like instrument that carries it has shaped not only her life, but an unlikely geography of cultural preservation. From a quiet street in Berkeley, she has helped safeguard one of Africa’s most spiritually charged musical traditions.
Mbira is not entertainment in the Western sense. It is ritual music, played to summon ancestral spirits, guide healing ceremonies, and bind communities across generations. Its repertoire is vast, subtle, and deeply local: songs, tunings, and scales can differ from one village to the next. What Azim grasped early on and acted upon with uncommon seriousness was how vulnerable that diversity was.
Over four decades, the nonprofit she founded, MBIRA, has grown into one of the world’s most significant archives of Shona mbira. Thousands of recordings, many made by Azim herself during repeated journeys through rural Zimbabwe, document masters whose music might otherwise have disappeared with them. A recently launched streaming platform now offers more than 450 hours of performances, opening a living archive to listeners around the world.
Just as important is where the money goes. MBIRA has sold thousands of mbiras made by Shona artisans and returned more than $1.6m directly to musicians and instrument makers often providing a vital income stream in a country battered by drought, hyperinflation, and decades of political mismanagement.
“All proceeds go back,” Azim says simply. “As of last year, we’d worked with more than 300 makers and musicians.”
Scholar and Steward
Azim’s authority rests not on academic distance but on immersion. She has studied and performed with many of the most revered Shona practitioners of the late 20th century, absorbing regional styles with a discipline that earned trust in communities often wary of outsiders. Her own playing is resolutely traditional yet expansive, shaped by decades of listening rather than innovation for its own sake.
“She’s as knowledgeable as anyone in the US,” says Berkeley composer Todd Boekelheide, who produced her 1992 album Mbira Dreams. “But more importantly, she understands the responsibility that comes with that knowledge.”
That responsibility has grown heavier as mbira has become increasingly endangered at home. As in many societies, young Zimbabweans are drawn toward Western pop, church music, and electronic instruments. State support for traditional arts is minimal. Without sustained demand, even master instrument makers struggle to justify the labour of a craft that takes years to perfect.
“No one there can afford to buy a mbira,” Azim explains. “People expect relatives to make one for free. Creating an international market allowed master makers to keep working and keep refining what they do.”
Following the Sound
Azim’s journey began in Berkeley in the late 1960s, when she first heard mbira while auditing an ethnomusicology class at UC Berkeley. A precocious student, she graduated high school at 15 and enrolled at the University of Washington, studying with Dumisani Maraire. But recordings hinted at a deeper, rural tradition beyond the urban style she was learning.
At 20, she travelled to what was then Rhodesia, still under white-minority rule and locked in an armed struggle for independence. Barred from visiting rural areas, she followed sound instead into bars and record shops, where mbira records circulated quietly.
“The government taught that traditional Shona culture was barbaric,” she recalls. “So when a white girl pulled a mbira out of her handbag, it was like a Martian landing.”
Introductions followed. Teaching followed. Recording came later. Mbira, she learned, was an oral tradition sustained by memory, repetition, and community.
A Living Lineage
By the early 1990s, Azim’s Berkeley workshops had become pilgrimage sites for mbira students across the US. She brought Shona masters to teach and perform, founded MBIRA in 1998, and continued working closely with artisans as Zimbabwe’s economy slid into crisis.
Her influence now extends through dancers, musicians, and educators. Oakland-based choreographer Julia Tsitsi Chigamba, whose father was a master mbira player Azim recorded in the 1990s, says those recordings remain a vital link to home. “When I see those CDs, it reminds me who we were,” she says. “She is like a mother to many people.”
Azim still plays regularly. On 17 August, she will perform duets with Vitalis Samaita Botsa at the Freight in Berkeley—a rare appearance by one of mbira’s greatest living improvisers, a village musician who still plays primarily for ceremonies and teaches children at his local school.
It is music shaped by centuries, sustained by memory, and carried across continents by a woman who fell in love with a sound and chose to spend her life listening.
