The fact Stella Chiweshe would become the grande dame of Zimbabwean mbira music was certainly not written in the stars. "I'm a rebel," states the now seventy-year-old music legend, and that may still be an understatement. Chiweshe grew up on a musical diet consisting almost exclusively of American rock 'n' roll and country, and initially showed little or no interest in the traditional music of her people, the Shona. Stella still doesn't know quite how to explain her unforeseen passion for the thumb piano and calls it an overwhelming mystical event. But this sudden affection for the instrument did not immediately make it a logical career option for a young woman in what was then still Southern Rhodesia. None of the male mbira musicians wanted to teach her, and, even worse, none of the instrument makers wanted to make a mbira for a woman. In the end Stella had no choice but to record her 1974 debut single 'Kasahwa' on a borrowed mbira. The song soon turned Chiweshe into a local sensation and after Southern Rhodesia gained independence in 1980 and officially became Zimbabwe, she also started touring internationally and became one of the very first "world music stars". Over the past few decades Chiweshe has been constantly commuting between Berlin and her homeland Zimbabwe, and now things around the Zimbabwean singer have quieted down somewhat, this compilation of her earliest work, recorded in the run-up to the Chimurenga revolution (a civil war that followed the decolonization wave of the nineteen fifties and took place between July 1964 and December 1979, with three parties battling it out for the rule of Rhodesia: on one side the government led by Ian Smith, defending the interests of the white minority, another group involved was ZANLA or the Zimbabwean African National Liberation Army, the military wing of Robert Mugabe's ZANU party or the Zimbabwean African National Union, and the third party was ZPRA or the Zimbabwean Revolutionary People's Army of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union or ZAPU), and made available for the first time outside of Zimbabwe, forms the perfect comeback album. Mbira in its simplest and purest form!