Join the heaving hundreds singing along with Thomas Mapfumo and you will see, hear, feel how music can be a liberating force. The whoops and cheers for the man they call the Lion of Zimbabwe have broken the quiet of a balmy January night in Mutare, a normally sleepy spread of jacaranda-shaded streets tucked amid the granite outcrops of the country's lush Eastern Highlands. In Queen's Hall, the revelers dance across a floor sticky with spilled lager, lost in the thump of the drums, the brassy blare of the horns and the hypnotic spell of the lyrics. Listen. What you hear isn't just Mapfumo's rasp through an amplifier. Mapfumo is the amplifier. "He is the voice of the people," says Ephraim, a businessman.

Despite the police, who watch, arms folded, the onlookers sing — no, shout — things they wouldn't dare say. The biggest singalong moment comes in Marima Nzara, a lament about a man with a big mouth who chases all the workers away. "You have lost the plot," everyone sings. "You have plowed hunger." Mapfumo never names the big mouth, but everyone knows it's President Robert Mugabe, who has led independent Zimbabwe for all of its 23 increasingly miserable years. "I'm just trying to reach the people," Mapfumo says. The roars that shake the packed hall suggest he's succeeding.

That same week, on the opposite side of the country, Oliver Mtukudzi — Mapfumo's former bandmate and the other giant of Zimbabwean music — is in Binga, a rural area on Zimbabwe's western edge. Binga is as hot, parched and brown as Mutare is cool, well-watered and green. Tuku, as he's known to friends and fans, settles down on a dusty wooden bench with his guitar. All day, he has been clapping his big hands, flapping his long arms, and high-stepping around the bare concrete floor of a thatched rondavel-turned-makeshift studio — anything to fire up the choir of aids orphans with whom he is recording a charity album. Unused to the rigor and repetition of a recording session, especially in this infernal heat, the children are wilting. It's time for a break — and it's Tuku's turn to sing.

A dozen kids cluster round, jostling for the best view of the fingers that sprint across the strings. Then Tuku's voice, strong and clear with a hint of gravel, silences the choristers as it launches into an improv medley: "What you do in the dark can be known in a day/ What you do behind closed doors can be known everywhere." "One, two, three, four child ... no go school, no food." And from his 1998 hit Todii, a question, originally about aids, but now so relevant to all of the country's crises, whether political, economic, natural or spiritual: "What shall we do?"

In Zimbabwe, the answer has always been to make music. Traditionally, the mbira (thumb piano) was used to summon spirits for help. Music was also Zimbabwe's oral newspaper, and the sung editorials often spurred action. In the '70s, when Ian Smith's whites-only government ruled what was then Rhodesia, says Mapfumo, "music inspired youngsters to fight that oppressive regime."

Zimbabwe is independent now, he says, "but the struggle is not yet won." In a land where most trickles of dissent are quickly dammed, Zimbabwe's two musical legends sing on and sing out like floods. They have different styles — the brash Mapfumo is more head-on political; Mtukudzi, the soft-spoken storyteller, prefers parables. But their songs are variations on a common theme — building a great Zimbabwe.

While Mugabe jets around the world, these two musicians rebuke and encourage the people back home. Protest songs may have largely died out in the West after the Vietnam era. But in southern Africa, where music is more than just a soundtrack to people's lives, they still matter. "When I sing, I am raising the Zimbabwean flag," says Mtukudzi. If Mugabe, nature and circumstance have brought the nation to its knees, then these patriots are singing "Stand up!"

You have to wonder whether Mapfumo and Mtukudzi are experiencing déjà vu. Both rose to prominence in the Harare township of Highfields in the 1970s, during the country's final push for freedom. "In those days, blacks couldn't go into town after dark," recalls Charles Tavengwa, proprietor of the Mushandira Pamwe Hotel, the legendary nightspot where both men played early in their careers. "One of the only places they could come was the hotel." Mapfumo and Mtukudzi did more than sing. "There was always a message to the music," says Tavengwa. "They were singing for all Zimbabwe and rallying people together."

In 1977, Mtukudzi joined the Wagon Wheels, a popular band that also featured Mapfumo. But both soon broke away to find fame on their own. Mapfumo was always the more militant. His song Hokoya (Watch Out!) got him sent to jail for three months in 1977, and Pamuromo Chete ("It's Just Talking," 1978), an upbeat reply to Smith's vow that Africans would never rule, got blacks to join the independence battle. Mapfumo's music became so identified with the chimurenga — Shona for "struggle" — that the style was itself dubbed chimurenga. Two years later, as black Zimbabwe celebrated its liberation, Tuku and his band, the Black Spirits, hit the charts with Africa, an album filled with driving dance beats and heady optimism about the future.

For years, Zimbabwe did live up to its revolutionary promise. It was southern Africa's land of milk and honey — and maize and tobacco and beef. But drought and a botched land-reform program have decimated farming. Last week, a government report named prominent members of the ruling ZANU-PF, including Mugabe's sister and top officials, who had broken the "one man, one farm" rule for the redistribution of white-owned commercial farms. Zimbabweans had known this all along, but it was the first time the violations had been acknowledged at the top. Amid the chaos, production of maize, the staple of the diet, has plunged to 20% of 1999 levels. Inflation has officially soared to 200%; shoppers say the real rate is much higher. Price controls have only made things worse. On the black market, a loaf of bread goes for 10 times the official price — that is, if you can find one. Bakeries use the ingredients to make non-price-controlled products like rolls.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change should be leading the call for reform. And its members are, when not in court — leader Morgan Tsvangirai is on trial for treason, for allegedly plotting Mugabe's assassination — or jail. Indeed, it often seems as if ZANU-PF's only effective policy has been the systematic emasculation of the MDC. The repression means, as one Harare woman says, "we're all ZANU-PF on the outside, MDC on the inside."

In Binga, where Tuku is working with the orphans' choir, Zimbabwe's crises converge in one misery-ridden corner. City folk consider it Hicksville and still say the locals are so backward that they're born with two toes per foot. But they're suffering from worse things than outsiders' disdain. The area's 500-plus orphans know why the choristers wrote Iwe AIDS: "You killed my father, you killed my mother ... I remain all alone." Dry, cracked streambeds are evidence of the unbroken drought. Some villagers are eating tree bark. More than 150,000 in the Matabeleland North province rely on foreign food aid.

Here, as elsewhere, hardship is linked to politics. In the 2000 parliamentary elections, the mdc swept all eight seats in the province, its rural heartland. Last year, 61% of Matabeleland North voters chose Tsvangirai over Mugabe for President. Suffrage isn't supposed to bring suffering, but the people are still paying for their votes. "A family will walk 60 km to get maize meal at the [regime-run] Grain Marketing Board," says an aid worker. "They'll be told to come back the next day. When they do, it has all been given to people." Which explains the oft-told joke: ZANU-PF has no supporters, only beneficiaries.

Last week, Mugabe was in Paris at the Franco-African summit, hobnobbing with other leaders and enjoying, thanks to his hosts, the temporary suspension of his E.U. travel ban. Most Zimbabweans didn't notice he was gone. Nor did they when he jetted off to Southeast Asia on vacation or to Zambia for a meeting or to Libya to visit his friend Muammar Gaddafi. People are busy with other worries, like what to feed the family. You might only notice when Mugabe's convoy — jeeploads of soldiers and that shiny black Mercedes — speeds by on its way to the airport. (It's illegal now to make rude gestures as it goes by; apparently too many people were doing so and it got on the presidential nerves.)

Mostly, though, he's cloistered behind the high walls of his Harare compound. From there, Mugabe — once a hero, a man of the people — fights. The media may make it seem as if the battle today were racial, as if the President were lashing out primarily at the rich, land-owning whites left over from the bad old days. It's not. While the atmosphere in Zimbabwe is akin to what you might have found in apartheid-era South Africa — another place where music, from impoverished townships like Soweto and Alexandra, spurred the people on to action — the real fight here "is really black vs. black," says a Zimbabwean M.P. "It's black people against a black leader." "The old man makes his own people panic," says Job, a taxi driver. (Names have been changed in order to protect the speakers.) "The day will come when we say 'Enough is enough.'"

We thought we were liberated, but we were not," Mapfumo says, two days after the Mutare show, over a stew-and-rice dinner in the living room of his spacious Harare home. (Even stars can't always get maize for sadza, the staple porridge.) Mapfumo, 57, whose waist-length dreadlocks seem designed to defy his receding hairline, realized in the late 1980s that he might have to go back to battle. "Corruption was rampant," he says. "Mugabe has taken the wrong direction." His reply: Varombo Kuvarombo (1988), released abroad in 1989 as Corruption. He hasn't let up, writing songs like Zvatakabva Kuhondo (As we finish the battle, 1994) and Ndiyani Waparadza Musha (Who has destroyed our home?, 1998).

State-run ZBC radio — the main source of news and entertainment — often bans Mapfumo's songs. During the chimurenga, ZANU-PF ran a Mozambique-based short-wave station that beamed into the country, a tactic that exiled Zimbabweans are using again. Now the regime is fighting back, recruiting popular singers to make propaganda albums. But the artists who sign on "are hated [for] glorifying a corrupt, brutal system," says a Harare music critic. Thompson Tsodzo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture, admits the strategies are futile. "The government can't control music," he says. Artists like Mapfumo will be heard — on tapes copied until they're frayed, on short-wave radio, in bars and beerhalls. "Ministers had better listen," says Tsodzo. "Musicians are voicing what the people are saying."

Mapfumo's latest album, Toi Toi, was released three weeks ago in Zimbabwe. The sounds are familiar — melodic mbira, twangy guitars, Big Band brass. The name comes from a type of protest music, but Mapfumo's manager, Cuthbert Chiromo, says Toi Toi is "more reflective, less political." Not apolitical — this is Mapfumo, after all. The biggest buzz among the fans is about the track Timothy. The song censures a fool who endangers children. The President is often called T.I.M. — "That Idiot Mugabe." Coincidence? Ask the music man himself, and he beams mischievously, saying only, "Great song!"

Detractors say it's easy for Mapfumo to criticize since he and his family spend most of their time in the U.S. They moved in 2000 "for the children," he says, echoing virtually every Zimbabwean parent who has emigrated. He comes back every year to face the music and make more, and he says: "I would die fighting for my freedom and my country." Some of his critics ask if he's also willing to live — and suffer — with his countrymen.

You can quibble about where Mapfumo should live, but the fight in Zimbabwe is about one people, not one man. "The people can change the situation," he says. "They must choose their destiny." It's not just a matter of taking up arms against Mugabe. Today, "the nation is destroyed," says Mapfumo. Even after the President is gone, it's going to take time — and a lot of hard work — to build it up again. That's why the men and their music are important, says opposition M.P. Tafadzwa Musekiwa: Mapfumo "sings about what we need to do now so we can achieve all that Tuku says."

Maybe what Mapfumo suggests would happen sooner if Zimbabweans took what Tuku says to heart. "Solving Zimbabwe's problems begins with us," says Mtukudzi, 50. "We have to help ourselves first." For him, step one is to look inward. What are Zimbabweans living and dying for? What really matters? Tuku's reputation has been built on asking and answering such questions, through parable and metaphor. Outsiders who don't have the social or political context — or fluency in Shona or Ndebele — might not understand the references in his songs. The words may even seem preachy. To Zimbabweans, though, it's the truth.

Mtukudzi refuses to decrypt his lyrics. "I'm happy for people to get meaning from my songs," he says. It helps that there's usually consensus about what he's singing. Take the hugely popular Wasakara, from his 2000 album Bvuma (Tolerance). To the beat of conga drums and the gentle rattle of hosho shakers, Tuku presses an aged man to admit there are things he can no longer do: "You are spent/ It is time to accept you are old." Most Zimbabweans heard an allusion to the President, then 76. A crew member at a show thought so too. He cast the spotlight on Mugabe's portrait during Wasakara and earned a trip to jail.

After the release last year of Vhunze Moto (Burning Ember), which shows Zimbabwe in flames on its cover, Mtukudzi was questioned by the feared Central Intelligence Organisation, the secret police. Even they couldn't get him to explain his lyrics. He said, "You speak Shona, don't you?" Mtukudzi feels his songs don't need interpretation. "Everybody knows right and wrong," he says. "Deep down, they know."

The Highfields-born Mtukudzi's own morality and musicality were shaped by his Christian upbringing. Over 25 years and more than 40 albums, he has developed his own style, a fusion of his gospel roots and more traditionally Shona sounds and rhythms, called Tuku Music. Asked if it still qualifies as gospel, he shoots back: "What does gospel mean?" Good news. "Then it is gospel," he says. Strange, Isn't It?, from the 1988 album of the same name, seems his clearest statement of intent. On this song, he calls a musician chipangamazano, a giver of advice. "I want people to think about the right thing," he says, "whether they sit in the seat of power or not."

"Tuku has this dream that if he plugs them enough, he will be able to help restore fundamental values," says Debbie Metcalfe, his manager. "He feels there's no moral fiber left." He's not the only one who thinks that. Many Zimbabweans believe the country's problems will not be solved until society, top to bottom, reforms. But where do values and moral fiber come from? For Zimbabweans, there's one refrain — sometimes phrased differently, but always the same: "We need God."

One of Mtukudzi's best-known songs outside Zimbabwe is Hear Me, Lord (1994), a high-speed ride to heaven on a guitar riff. The rousing plea for divine intervention was covered by American singer Bonnie Raitt. Perhaps better than any other song in his catalog, its lyrics sum up how Zimbabweans, many devoutly Christian like Tuku, feel today: "Help me Lord, I'm feeling low." "Zimbabwe needs God," says Fungisai Zvakanapano, a rising gospel star. "That's where our future is."

The future is definitely on Tuku's mind. "I hate songs that only work for a particular period," Mtukudzi says. "A song has to work yesterday, today and tomorrow." Which is why his recent albums have so many songs about aids. More than 1.8 million Zimbabweans — a quarter of all adults — are HIV positive. It's a personal issue; his circle of family and friends, like almost all in Zimbabwe, has been hit hard. And the problem is not going away. That's why he said yes when the NGO Ntengwe for Community Development asked him to work with the Binga orphans on their recording, which will raise funds for a trust benefiting them and their destitute communities. And that's why he has written so much about aids, including Todii, a Tuku classic with its lilting guitar lines and searching call-and-response, and the mournful Mabasa, which asks, "Who will feed whom since the breadwinners are all dying?"

Mtukudzi is not dismissing Zimbabwe's shorter-term struggles. For instance, last fall, he helped start the Music for Food Collective, whose concerts help raise funds to address a very immediate need — hunger. "But these troubles will come to an end. It's a phase," he says. His focus is based on his belief that whatever phase Zimbabwe is in, it will always need core values — self-discipline, respect for others, cultural pride, faith. The fans seem to agree. "Eh, Tuku!" says Shamiso, a maid. "He knows our suffering." "Tuku sings our reality," says Ebenezer, a waiter. "He sings what has happened and what will."

Critics insist the reality might be different if Mtukudzi tackled politics. "He's like everyone else — afraid," says one. He could exploit his popularity to make a statement. "But at what price?" asks John Matinde, a DJ at SW Radio Africa. "He could come out with a killer of an album — and spend the rest of his life in jail." Tuku knows there's power in what he does and the way he does it. "A musician is not a politician. He is there to entertain," he says. "But a musician is also there to help. He is a leader trying to tell, to teach." Jail would mean class is over.

What should Zimbabwe do, Tuku? What does the land need? "We need rain!" he declares, with a grin that says "You're not going to get me to talk about politics!" "We need to believe in who we are, to regain respect for one another." Later, he offers a telling comment on the mood of the people: "When water is boiling, it's bound to spill over."

In this freedom fight, as in a similar one some two decades ago, music is applying pressure. "To us, music is life," says Black Spirits bassist Never Mpofu. Songs like Mapfumo's anthemic Huni ("Do not play with the people, because the people can revolt") and Mtukudzi's thoughtful Kucheneka ("Emulate those who are brave, those who went before you") remind the powerful and the powerless of the possibility of change. "The music is so important to the people," says Mapfumo. "Let's just keep our fingers crossed that it will work."

Some people may wonder why it hasn't already, but then the liberation war took years. "We are a patient people," says Jacob, a clerk from Mutare. "Sometimes too patient." "People are getting the messages through this music," says Chipo, a Bulawayo student. "We know they are singing from the heart. In time, it will help us stand up."

On Mtukudzi's last morning in Binga, the choir seems to be stronger, more confident. They zip through a couple of songs, and Tuku raises his arms to heaven, in triumph — or is it thanksgiving? But they soon tire. Their voices crack. Their legs ache. Their new outfits — rich gold paired with a chocolate-brown batik — make them itch.

Partway into Bonga Hlabelela, a hopeful song written by the children that says, "Have faith in the Lord! Sing! Sing!", Tuku waves the choir to a stop. He consults the choirmasters about a note change, then turns back to the group. They start. And above their rapidly building four-part harmony, you hear Tuku, spurring them on. "Open your mouths! Louder! I want you to break these walls down!" It's a message all Zimbabwe needs to hear.

-Jeff Chu | Harare