Todii

Oliver Mtukudzi's voice was one of the most distinctive instruments in African music — a roughened, warm baritone with a quality of lived texture that made youth an impossible attribute to assign it regardless of when you heard it. By the time this song was recorded he had already made the transition from prominent local figure to genuine pan-African artist, and "Todii" represents the moment when his music confronted the AIDS epidemic directly and unflinchingly. The question at the heart of the song — what shall we do? — is asked not rhetorically but genuinely, with the confusion and grief of someone who does not have the answer and is not pretending otherwise. The arrangement is characteristic Tuku — a mixture of mbira-influenced guitar lines, the specific high-lonesome tone of Zimbabwean guitar playing, and the tsambo rhythmic tradition that he developed across decades of work. There is a restraint to the production that honors the weight of the subject: nothing is over-arranged, nothing distracts from the central human problem the lyrics are turning over. The backing vocals respond to his lead with something that is both grief and tenderness simultaneously. This is music that earns its sorrow rather than simply evoking it generically, which is a much harder thing to do.