HARARE - Alick Macheso has made a career of bending guitar strings. At Wicknell Chivayo’s funeral gathering, the country watched him bend at the waist instead, and it has not stopped arguing about it since.
The moment lasts a few seconds. In a 14-second clip posted on X on 5 October, the sungura star, dressed in black, makes his way along a line of mourners in a crowded room hung with a portrait of the late businessman. He reaches a man in a dark suit, drops into a deep, low bow, almost a crouch, and takes the man’s hand in both of his. When he straightens up, his palms are pressed together under his chin, as if in prayer.
The man in the suit was Collins Mnangagwa, one of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s sons, an electrical engineer and businessman. @tino_bonde_05, who posted a longer version of the footage, named “Honorable Collins” and concluded: “Macheso is humble.” @CadreShangrila captioned his clip: “That’s my brother there, Eng Collins Mnangagwa, consoling Alick Macheso at Sir Wicknell’s funeral.”
Collins has an identical twin, Sean, an officer in the Zimbabwe National Army, and that was enough to send part of the internet down the wrong corridor. The account @Mr_Mhere, whose post of the clip has been viewed more than 27,000 times, took the President’s son for Sean and read the gesture as a military salute: “he salutes the rank”. On 8 October, @Takudzwa_dk was still puzzling over it: “Did Macheso serve in the army ?, coz why did he salute kumwana weMukuru ?”
Others saw simply the Macheso they know. The musician, wrote @IreneTariroWyn, “is baba Sharo such a humble and emotional man we can’t take away this from him.”
Macheso had arrived late, iHarare reported, because he had been away performing, and his tearful address to mourners also went viral. His written tribute after the crash opened “Impfa nimulandi” and went on “Rufu imbavha”, death is a thief. Chivayo gave him a Mercedes-Benz GLE in 2024 and had recently arranged vehicles for members of his band, Orchestra Mberikwazvo, according to iHarare. Macheso has not, in any report ZimDaily could find, explained the bow.
What the bow means
To a foreign eye, a national treasure folding himself in half before a man in his thirties looks like politics. To many Zimbabwean eyes, it looks like being raised properly.
“For girls or women, this could involve kneeling and clapping, then asking each individual in turn about their health,” the BBC explained of Shona greetings in 2017. “Boys and men will do much the same, but crouching. Failing to do so is frowned upon, and taken as a sign of a poor upbringing or lack of respect.”
The Shona culture site Zvangu notes that “Men and boys will often clap their hands with hollowed palms”, and that “Sometimes, women will even kneel on the floor to greet an elder who is sitting down.” The custom is not only about age. The blog Mapanzure records that women were expected to “kneel totally when greeting male persons they respected.”
Macheso was not the only mourner whose manners went viral. TNX Africa reported on 9 October that a video of a woman kneeling as she moved along a line of seated men at the Chivayo home “has sparked debate online”, with some calling it submission and others defending it as an expression of cultural respect during a mourning gathering.
The argument is older than either clip. Dwight S.M. Mutonono, in a 2020 paper in the Asbury Journal, argues: “While the continued private practice of the culture is the prerogative of individual Zimbabweans and cannot be legislated against, the public expression of kneeling is now counter-productive. It is not achieving the original intentions of honouring the behaviour’s recipient. Because of abuse and possible interpretive misunderstandings, it should be stopped.”
That is the knot. The same bow that says “my mother raised me” in a village courtyard can say “I know who your father is” in a room full of cameras. Macheso, who has never been accused of excessive self-regard, may well have meant only the first. The internet heard the second.
Chivayo, declared a provincial hero by the President, and his wife, Lucy Muteke, who died in a helicopter crash near Marondera on 30 September, were buried side by side at Sahwira Glen Forest Memorial Park on 8 October, The Herald reported. Nobody has yet posted a clip of who bowed to whom.
