Keep the Timbila Playing

A film about a great musician, Venancio Mbande (66). Composer, poet, instrument builder, performer and leader of orchestras of timbila, a family of huge African xylophones, played almost exclusively in Chopiland, a province of southern Mozambique. This very complex music has a tradition dating back centuries. It was first described in 1562 by a Portuguese missionary.In 1991 'The Hague Percussion Group' invited Venancio to come to Holland to teach them and record a CD with them. He came for three months and left behind in The Hague the only timbila orchestra outside Africa. In August 1999, these Dutch musicians went to Mozambique to study with the master again and to play with him and the other Chopi musicians at the Msaho, the yearly timbila festival in the middle of nowhere.Venancio lived and worked in the gold and platinum mines of South Africa for 45 years. In the eighties, when the civil war in Mozambique made timbila performances impossible, because they are so large and attract a lot of people, Venancio and his mine-orchestra kept timbila music alive in exile, in South Africa.