The Godfather of Zamrock
Rikki Ililonga (born Rikezo Makuyu Ililonga, 9 February 1949) grew up with roots in the Zambezi district of Zambia's North-Western Province before moving to Ndola on the Copperbelt. There he learned to play the banjo in the style popularised in the mining towns — the first step of a journey that would make him a founding father of Zamrock.
As a young man he was sent to Syracuse University in the USA on a political leadership course sponsored by UNIP, Zambia's independence party. He came home with something else entirely: a head full of The Beatles, The Who, Buddy Holly and James Brown. Ililonga walked away from a promising political career and chose the guitar — which he had first picked up at 18 — soaking up Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Cream, and finding his true north the night he saw Ghana's Osibisa "singing in their own tongue and not trying to sound like anybody else."
He kept a day job just long enough to notice that a weekend of playing paid better — then quit the "mundane things" for good. With his band Musi-O-Tunya — "the smoke that thunders", the local name for Victoria Falls — he played the miners' taverns of the Copperbelt and the hotel circuit until the band's fuzz-heavy Afro-rock made them national stars and put Zambian rock on the world map.
A true polyglot of groove, Ililonga sings in English, Silozi, Chinyanja and Ichibemba, and moves effortlessly between electric and bass guitar, drums, congas, kalimba and harmonica. On his solo debut Zambia he famously played every instrument himself. In April 1976 he won the Makumbi Song Festival award. Today he divides his time between his adopted home in Denmark and Zambia — still in dreads, beret and sunglasses, still rocking.
