Digital Projects

Sekuru’s Stories (2017)

Sekuru’s Stories is a digital public humanities project featuring the renowned Zimbabwean mbira player, oral historian, and ritual specialist Sekuru Tute Chigamba. Framing Chigamba’s oral histories through the Shona narrative genre of nhoroondo, or stories about the past, it offers a first-person account of African musical history from below, tracing a single performer’s journey through experiences of missionization, colonization, labor migration, and independence. By integrating oral narratives with recordings, photographs, and maps, Sekuru’s Stories presents Zimbabwean musical and cultural heritage in an interactive format.

Ambuya: Zimbabwe’s Women Mbira Musicians (2024)

Ambuya is a collaboration between American ethnomusicologist Jennifer Kyker and members of the women’s musical collective Mhare DzeNhare, or “Experts of the Mbira.” Through recordings, photographs, transcriptions and translations of song lyrics, and biographical information, Ambuya highlights the work of Zimbabwe’s women mbira musicians. Conceived of as a digital album, Ambuya presents an innovative online music format that encourages listeners to engage with complex digital musical objects, extending the possibilities for online music production beyond conventional streaming platforms.

Portrait of Zimbabwe/Mifananidzo yeZimbabwe (2025)

Portrait of Zimbabwe/Mifananidzo yeZimbabwe presents the work of Chicago Dzviti (1961-1995), a pioneering Zimbabwean photographer whose archive offers an extensive visual record of Zimbabwean social, cultural, and musical life. Trained in the photojournalistic tradition, Dzviti focused his lens on a broad cross-section of Zimbabwean life during the early 1990s, a time when the ambitious social welfare programs implemented after independence were increasingly abandoned in favor of economic structural adjustment programs. Zimbabwe’s rich musical life was one of Chicago Dzviti’s primary inspirations, and his photographs offer intimate portraits of several Zimbabwean popular music legends, as well as traditional musicians, musical instruments, and instrument makers around the country. Portrait of Zimbabwe/Mifananidzo yeZimbabwe brings Chicago Dzviti’s exceptional photographs into public view for the first time, contributing to the history of visual arts in Zimbabwe, and to the global art world’s growing interest in photographers from across the African continent