The Voice of the Ancestors, Played Inside a Gourd

The mbira dzavadzimu, whose name translates roughly as voice of the ancestors, is a set of metal keys of graduated length mounted on a hardwood soundboard, plucked with the thumbs and forefingers and typically played from inside a resonating gourd called a deze that amplifies and shapes its tone. Bourdillon's ethnography of the Shona peoples places the instrument at the centre of the bira, an all night ceremony held to communicate with the vadzimu, ancestral spirits, in which mbira music is understood not merely to accompany the ceremony but to actively help draw the presence of ancestral spirits, sometimes through possession of a designated medium, into the gathering.

The instrument is conventionally played in interlocking pairs, a leading part called kushaura and a following, complementary part called kutsinhira, whose combined cyclical patterns, together with the buzzing resonance produced by loose metal bottle caps or shells attached to the soundboard, create the dense, continuously layered sound characteristic of mbira music. Learning the instrument traditionally passes from an elder relative or recognised teacher to a younger player over years of practice, since correct tuning and the specific songs associated with particular ancestors and occasions are transmitted orally rather than through written notation.