The man sometimes described as Zimbabwe's Bob Marley answered the telephone cautiously. A singer whose protest music pushed for independence against the white minority government of what was then Rhodesia, he has since been forced into exile by the authoritarian rule of President Robert Mugabe.

"Thomas Mapfumo?" I asked after getting past a call-blocking device.

"Who's this?" Mapfumo responded with a low rasp from his home in Eugene, Ore., where he now lives.

The interview had been prearranged, but he was careful. Fame isn't his only reason to be cautious, even though Mapfumo comes as close to legendary status as anyone in southern African music, specifically chimurenga music. It's a music he largely created, the deceptively light, polyrhythmic pulse of political struggle, and based on the cyclical patterns played on the traditional, metal-pronged mbira.

Whenever he returns to Zimbabwe, Mapfumo is threatened by government thugs. When he's away, the Mugabe-aligned press attacks him. Yet, Zimbabwe's economic devastation under the government's tight fist has only strengthened the protest message in Mapfumo's new album Rise Up, currently available in North America only as a digital download at calabashmusic.com.

"When you are fighting against oppression, there is no difference. It is the same thing we were fighting against in colonial days. And now this man is in power; he is black like me, and he is still doing the same. The message doesn't change at all," Mapfumo said.

"The first song on the CD is Kunarira Mukati," which Mapfumo said means "silent suffering." "A lot of people have hate inside, but they are afraid to stand up and say something. So we are saying to them, you shouldn't just keep quiet. You have to say something. This has been going on for more than 20 years now. How long are we going to suffer?"

Mapfumo's music is banned from Zimbabwean radio, although some of his old material is more or less sanctioned. A disc of his liberation songs from the 1970s with his group at the time, the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, was recently reissued, harking to an era Mugabe continually celebrates.

It was a time when guerrilla fighters were listening to Mapfumo shift his music away from heavily Western-influenced rock and incorporate traditional instruments and lyrics in the language of his Shona people. It became an act of protest against the Rhodesian government, just as the roots movements in reggae and rock around the world were similarly laced with politics.

Mugabe would like to pretend that Mapfumo existed only in that era. "I'm in the history books. Schoolchildren learn about me. They talk about me, what I did during the liberation struggle, the part my music played," Mapfumo said. "They tell the people that kind of history. And yet they don't want to play my music on the radio."

It seems no surprise, then, that Mapfumo has had problems getting his latest album pressed and sold in his country. To Western listeners, it may be hard to appreciate how the lilting harmonies, the plink-plonk of mbiras and skipping beats can cause such opposition. The reason is in Mapfumo's moral messages. Zimbabwe's Gamma Records has had mechanical problems getting the CD manufactured, or so Mapfumo was told when he contacted the company. Only a few thousand copies have been pressed, a tiny fraction of what the singer believes he could sell if the administration wasn't trying to sabotage his album anyway it can, Mapfumo said.

Since moving away, he has continued to return to Zimbabwe to perform. He is allowed in the country, yet he is invariably harassed.

"The last time I was there, I was in the countryside. I went to see my folk there in the rural area. I went into the shops to by some meat -- from the butchery. And there was a group of youth. When they saw my car, they were coming for me. My brother saw that we needed to drive away."

The group followed them and eventually stopped Mapfumo's car. "When they approached us, they said they wanted to see our membership cards, political cards for the ZANU-PF party. I said they have no right to ask me about that. They were just trying to make problems. And then I pulled out my pistol and they ran away."

Meanwhile, the press attacks continue.

The Herald, a Zimbabwean newspaper, has claimed that Mapfumo exaggerates his popularity. "Mapfumo . . . now spends much of his time spreading falsehoods about alleged threats on his life while his music career is on the slide," a Herald article last December said. This was around the time when the singer had hoped to visit, but cancelled his trip after being told it was too dangerous for him during the runup to the election.

Citing a list of allegations, the article also repeated claims that Mapfumo's cars had been connected to an auto-theft ring.

The singer scoffed at this in a grandfatherly way, his heavily accented words occasionally rising above his normal baritone. "I don't want to talk to that paper, because they want to bring me down. Everything they say about me is suspect. That paper is for the ZANU-PF."

In trying to understand Mapfumo's story from so far away, so utterly removed from Zimbabwe and his experiences, I mentioned a quote attributed to Nigeria's late musical-great performer Fela Kuti that "in my society, there's no music for enjoyment. There's only a struggle for people to exist." I asked Mapfumo if all music in Zimbabwe under the Mugabe government is inevitably political.

"No, I don't think so," he answered to my surprise. "It depends on who they are, what their music is all about. My music is different than the rest of music in Zimbabwe."

Oliver Mutukudzi, another leading Zimbabwe musician, appears to be striving for apolitical ground, although this only seems to draw him deeper into controversy, particularly after performing at a ZANU-PF function shortly before the election.

"It had nothing to do with politics," Mutukudzi is quoted as saying in a Zimbabwe Standard article. "I have relatives everywhere, in the [opposition] MDC and even in ZANU-PF." Still, one of the singer's hits was also used in a government election ad. His manager described both moves as "business suicide" for Mutukudzi.

"I'm sure he's trying to be good so that these people won't come after him. But that's not the way. If you're a freedom fighter, you have to stand with the poor people, stand with those who are suffering," Mapfumo said.

Then there are other musicians who are berated for blatantly pandering to Mugabe, such as the singer Tambaoga, who had a sensationalist hit using a play on words likening Tony Blair to a toilet. Blair has been a regular target of Mugabe's rhetoric.

These musicians "are not popular with the people," Mapfumo added. "They are just being used for propaganda purposes." Yet for a sensationalist song like Tambaoga's to become a hit in a country so musically rich suggests an artificial vacuum, a hole caused by the absence of stronger cultural forces such as Mapfumo.

The situation, he said, is only getting worse, although he insists his music still has an impact on Zimbabweans.

"They go for my music. They are buying my music. And this is why they are trying to sabotage this CD."

-Guy Dixion