Chartwell Dutiro: Mahororo

The opening of Chartwell Dutiro's obituary on Afropop Worldwide:

Chartwell Dutiro has joined the ancestors. More than a brilliant Zimbabwean mbira player and a pillar of Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited during their rise to international fame in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Chartwell was a musical visionary with a deep and abiding fidelity to the Shona tradition in which he was raised, and a wry, witty cosmopolitanism that made him a singularly effective ambassador to the world.

Shorayi Dutiro’s journey began in a Kaganda village in the Bindura region of then-Southern Rhodesia. According to his passport, he was born on Dec. 26, 1957, but he was never certain of the accuracy, given the cavalier attitude of colonial Rhodesian authorities toward the residents of rural communities. 

He often told the story of how a white doctor, not his parents, decided to call him Chartwell, after Winston Churchill’s summer home. Only years later when he actually visited the place did Chartwell learn that this was the derivation of his name. Nevertheless, the name Chartwell has always appeared on his official documents.

And Wikipedia takes up the story:

As a teenager Chartwell moved to the capital, Harare, and became saxophonist with the Salvation Army band. A little later, in 1986, he joined the world-famous band Thomas Mapfumo & the Blacks Unlimited. Touring the world for eight years with that band, he was their arranger, mbira player and saxophonist. From 1994 until his death in 2019, Chartwell based himself in Britain where he continued to teach and play mbira.

Chartwell had academic qualifications in music, including a degree in Ethnomusicology from SOAS in London where he also taught for many years.