TAWANDA CHARI & TAKUDZWA HILLARY CHIWANZA
Before this review goes any further, it is imperative for us to make it unequivocally clear that MUTSA makes the best concept bodies of work of any Zimbabwean rapper; for his clarity of thought and incendiary lyricism are unmatched among his peers. In a muddied musical space where few artists care to share the bold message of universal solidarity (not that it’s their legally-mandated duty anyway but come on), MUTSA comes with his latest poignant project The Children are Always Ours to upend this languid approach towards the most pressing issues of contemporary society. He takes this critical message and amplifies it, telling us – in 8 songs that span 26 minutes – that existence is a group project. That is a radical message.
His latest EP takes inspiration from a quote by the iconoclastic thinker James Baldwin: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” Baldwin said this in his 1980 essay, “Notes on the House of Bondage,” in The Nation.
Here is a piercing work of rap in which MUTSA fearlessly lays his soul bare as he dissects the touchy subject of all the suffering that is pervasive in the world; hunger, neocolonial oppression, gendered violence, and the Palestinian genocide. He grieves for all the innocent lives entangled in this grisly handiwork of capitalist violence. And he does all this while trying not to unravel from the personal problems that afflict his life; his psyche. He years for individual change in the first instance in order to effect the positive change he envisions in the world.
MUTSA basically says we should all improve – for change starts in the individual’s heart – and that we need to continuously strive to be better regardless of how searing circumstances can be. We need to understand that there is no winning alone, MUTSA tells us through his fiery raps.
The essence of being is a concerted effort; the only way we can possibly win is together. The only way we can surmount the catastrophe wrought to our lives by the sinister machinations of capitalist imperialist domination is by banding together and realize that a tragedy in one corner of the world is a tragedy for the rest of humanity – and needs to be resolved with the utmost urgency. The personal is political, and the political is personal, MUTSA seems to tell us, as he narrates the myriad challenges his own life is beset with.
This is what lies at the core of The Children Are Always Ours.
Note to the reader: This is going to be a very long (but insightful and enjoyable) review, so we’ll do it on a track-by-track basis:
Bolvangar
There’s an eccentric stillness that courses through MUTSA’s The Children Are Always Ours, a silence that feels less more like aftermath. The EP doesn’t open with noise or confrontation; it opens with ‘Bolvangar’—a title drawn from Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’, bearing the meaning of “fields of evil.”
“Fields of Evil” is a fictional location in Philip Pullman's ‘His Dark Materials’ series. It is the name of a research facility in the Far North where the General Oblation Board performed experiments called intercision. The experiment severs the link between a child and their demon. The name is derived from the Old Norse words “bǫl” (evil) and “vangar” (fields).
Against this backdrop, the song sets the emotional temperature for everything that follows: children caught in machinery, innocence madly corrupted by devastating bouts of war, and the quiet terror of growing up in a world that keeps failing its young. A world that regards the lives of children as worthless, as if they are not human beings too.
‘Bolvangar’ situates the listener in a haunted landscape. Its soundscape is wide and cold, filled with faint echoes and siren tones, like the sound of a city breathing under curfew. MUTSA’s voice enters slowly, reflective and pained, narrating as though he’s walking through the ruins. The metaphor of ‘Bolvangar’ is heavy: it’s not just a fictional place, but a mirror for our own reality. A field where children are caged, bombed, or silenced by systems, even systems meant to protect them. In this way, MUTSA builds the framework of the EP early on.
“The children are always ours,” the project declares—even those the world tries to make invisible. It is this recalcitrance MUTSA embodies that animates his works, because everything he utters is concretely grounded in the reality of existence. Which explains why his music often feels unhurried, as he makes himself comfortable on low-paced rap instrumentals that traverse the worlds of lo-fi, experimental, and boom bap.
At the end of the song, there is a sampled monologue from a girl or young woman named Rejoice, recounting a traumatic experience of fleeing a camp and the devastating chain of events that followed—including the deaths of her mother and father, deaths that her relatives later blamed on her decision to run away to Harare. The details of her story are not entirely clear, but its emotional truth is unmistakable. The sense of guilt, displacement, and abandonment she describes ties eerily and beautifully into the themes introduced by the opening poem. Her voice becomes another thread in MUTSA’s visceral narration of wounded childhoods, suppressed pain, and the world’s persistent failures
The poem Ndarota (which means “I dreamed” in Shona) explores themes of pain, silence, and suppressed voices. In the line “Ndongonzi nyarara ndichingotsunyiwa,” the speaker expresses how they are told to be quiet even as they are being harmed (“tsunyiwa” means being bruised or wounded). The tension between suffering and forced silence is central: while the speaker experiences internal or external pain, society or others demand that they stay silent.
Abel Mauchi often writes with deep emotional intensity, drawing from Shona oral traditions proverbs, song, and folklore and connecting them to modern social issues: oppression, gendered violence, mental anguish, and the struggle to be heard. MUTSA adding such piece of poetry to his work shows his reverence for spoken word artistry and its power to address issues that bedevil our society.
 |
| MUTSA. |
I hate the fall (thank you Fa & Nikki)
In ‘I Hate the Fall,’ from MUTSA’s The Children Are Always Ours EP, the artist delivers a visceral meditation on death, loss, and human suffering. At the heart of the track is the dual meaning of “fall”: on one hand, it represents the literal fall of people. Lives lost in wars, systemic violence, and senseless tragedy. And on the other hand, it mirrors the season of autumn, a period marked by decay, endings, and the inevitability of mortality. MUTSA’s opening lines, “Every day that dawns brings a new death … Even now, the bombs are raining down in the Middle East. Gaza on its fucking knees,” immediately situate the listener in a world where global crises and personal grief intertwine, bringing to the fore the fragility of life in both a literal and metaphorical sense.
MUTSA paints his people as falling “like the autumn leaves, swept through the strip on a bloody river,” invoking haunting imagery that merges natural cycles with human tragedy. References such as “Tears like the Wadi Al Kuf” not only evoke real world suffering but also show his acute awareness of historical and ongoing conflict. Yet, the verse is never merely reportage; it is introspective. He is a historian in motion, leaving pages of evidence for posterity to rummage and reach their own verdict about what we stood for as a people in these manifestly tumultuous times -- did we stand for justice or we just let the violence continue unabated? Did we have the power to stop such delirious violence?
MUTSA reflects on the broader structures of injustice (religion, race, and systems of power) while acknowledging that the human experience of loss and resilience goes far beyond any single explanation. There’s a consciousness of both the micro and macro and how these intersect: the intimate pain of a community and the larger geopolitical forces shaping that pain.
The personal is political, and the political is personal.
Amid the debilitating despair, MUTSA’s vision for hope and action surfaces with unshakeable will. He declares, “I wanna feed you all. I look inside your eyes, I see the crisis in your soul. I see the rise, I see the fall,” transforming grief into empathy and purpose; into universal solidarity. He maps the trajectory of human suffering while asserting a responsibility to nurture, heal, and resist apathy. It’s as if he’s saying, to hate the fall is to love life so fiercely that death itself becomes unacceptable.
But we also get a glimpse of his feelings of powerlessness that he can’t banish when he says “l said I'd save you all, but damn I'm just a nigga. Go figure. Man, l need some liquor.” His heart longs for a noble purpose; but clearly, he can’t save everyone. That’s some heartbreaking stuff we expect from an artist truly in touch with their emotion. It feels real. And real has been scarce lately.
FITB (Fire In The Booth)
“Thunder dome,” “beating like my final call, beating like my final form,” and “havoc in that lightning storm” suggest that the artist is operating under immense pressure, facing significant challenges, or battling a monumental force, whether internal or external. These lines convey a sense of urgency and emotional turmoil, painting a picture of an artist caught in the storm of conflict, trying to maintain focus while chaos ferociously brews around him.
“Only swish, I never miss” is a classic basketball metaphor symbolizing precision, mastery, and confidence. Here, it encapsulates MUTSA’s unwavering pursuit of excellence. The follow up, “Another head, another goal,” deepens that sentiment. Each victory becomes another step in a relentless journey toward purpose and achievement.
The song’s introspection shines through in the lines “Caught between what’s right and wrong” and “Trying to justify who dies and lives to find what’s right and wrong.” This moral tension underlines the emotional core of the track, suggesting that MUTSA’s struggle extends beyond personal ambition into the realm of ethical questioning. The artist wrestles with choices where survival or success may demand morally ambiguous action. A universal dilemma faced by anyone navigating treacherous systems of power, oppression, or artistic integrity.
Perhaps the song’s most poignant shift comes when MUTSA turns outward: “Fighting for the kids, they gotta live” and “Shouted from the strip, they gotta live.” Here, the fight becomes communal, a declaration of responsibility toward the next generation. The repeated refrain, “I hope my mic is on,” is both literal and symbolic. Literally, it’s a plea for his words to be heard; symbolically, it becomes a motif for representation, visibility, and the desperate need for marginalized voices to resonate beyond silence. MUTSA’s “mic” becomes a vessel of truth, carrying the weight of those who can’t speak for themselves.
The inclusion of a sample from the 1976 PBS documentary ‘Rosedale: The Way It Is’ adds historical and emotional gravity. The clip features Black children in Rosedale, Queens, New York, sharing their experiences of racial exclusion while trying to integrate into a predominantly white neighborhood. By weaving this soundbite into the track, MUTSA bridges eras, linking the struggles of the past to those of the present. The voices of those children echo through his verses, serving as inspiration and indictment: a reminder that the fight for equality, safety, and belonging remains unfinished.
Vagrant
It begins with a sampled voice: the trembling, grief stricken speech of Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian observer to the UN, as he breaks down in tears speaking of Gaza’s children. “The occupation is starving us,” he laments. “We want to live, we want peace.” The moment is unbearable. A real voice from real suffering.
‘Vagrant’ gives The Children Are Always Ours a haunting pungency; a sonic requiem for displacement and guilt, for all the children dying in Palestine under the world’s watch. The sampled voice of Palestinian ambassador Riyad Mansour, trembling as he mourns “mothers embracing their motionless bodies,” instantly situates the track within a global grief. The wandering pain of the dispossessed.
MUTSA’s choice of the word vagrant (one without a home) becomes symbolic of spiritual and moral homelessness in a world that fails its children. The song transcends the mere act of echoing the tragedy of Gaza; it extends it into every soul burdened by survival, guilt, and the weight of being human in these violent times.
Lyrically, MUTSA’s writing feels like a confessional purge. Lines such as “I’ve been a killer from cradle to jump” and “I should’ve been close, I manned the way to the edge of the coast” reveal a narrator crushed under the memory of his own absence. A witness, a survivor, and a sinner all at once. The imagery shifts between the sacred and the profane. “Asking the halo, what’s heaven to God?” is a line reflecting a man questioning divinity in a ruined moral landscape. Here, vagrancy is not just physical homelessness, but an existential drift: a wandering through faith, guilt, and redemption with no clear home to return to.
Musically, the track is a minimalist canvas that lets the emotion breathe. MUTSA’s voice is weary, grounded in pain, yet it carries a sense of defiant purpose. The song ends not with resolution, but surrender: “Bury me whole. Sorry I couldn’t be more than my faults.” In the context of The Children Are Always Ours, ‘Vagrant’ stands as a lament for the lost, the guilty, and the human condition itself. It’s a reminder that in times of war and silence, even the survivors are wanderers, carrying the ghosts of those who couldn’t make it home.
Faith
‘Faith’ feels like a moment where belief and disillusionment coexist in a single breath. From the opening line, “I’ve seen your kids relapse, not for the lack of...” MUTSA situates faith within a world of relapse, struggle, and inherited pain. It’s not blind devotion he’s exploring here, but a faith bruised by history. Both personal and collective. The repetition of “Hands up to the sky and I felt millions, billions; my spirit bomb shines brilliant” transforms a seemingly simple Dragon Ball Z reference into something deeply metaphorical and fiercely potent. Faith as energy, as resistance, as the only weapon left in a broken world is the message telegraphed here.
The song’s power lies in how it threads the sacred with the violent. Lines such as “Saw my father damaged by the swords of the callous” and “I killed that child part of me” echo the disconcerting generational trauma that underpins much of the EP. Fathers wounded, sons desensitized, faith questioned but never fully abandoned. The travails of existence summed.
When MUTSA writes “All my people broken, all my people lonely, holding on to holy,” he captures a communal desperation: belief not as luxury, but as survival instinct. Even the invocation of “Alláh-u-Abhá” -- a Bahá’í expression meaning “God is Most Glorious” -- deepens the track’s spiritual hybridity, suggesting that faith, in its truest form, outleaps boundaries of religion or nationality.
“This faith of mine, I need that” loops like a heartbeat, pulsing through chaos, doubt, and exhaustion.
Baby Boy
Then comes ‘Baby Boy,’ which opens with the innocuous sounds of children playing. Laughter, at first, feels comforting. But MUTSA twists the context: this laughter is an uncanny memory, a haunting, an echo of what once was. The song feels like a letter to a lost child, perhaps imagined, perhaps real but always loved. It’s the most delicate moment on the EP, a song that hurts precisely because it refuses to dramatize its pain.
Thematically, ‘Baby Boy’ continues the emotional thread MUTSA weaves throughout The Children Are Always Ours—guilt, rebirth, failure, and the search for redemption. The opening line, “Feeling like a newborn in this new form, no more lukewarm,” mirrors the imagery of a child being reborn. Perhaps spiritually, or as someone trying to rediscover innocence after deep self ruin.
The sound of kids playing becomes both literal and symbolic: a reminder of purity, of what’s been lost, and of the generations still growing up in cycles of violence, silence, or neglect. It’s as if the song’s adult narrator is looking at his younger self. A “baby boy” who once believed in light, before pain hardened him.
As the song progresses, the tone shifts from regret to fatigue, acknowledging the inherited weight of generations: “Through the eyes and the faces of my forbears, years of unformed tears.” The background chatter of children feels almost like a haunting echo. They play unaware of the burdens waiting for them.
By the final repetition – “Feeling like a newborn in this new form” – the cycle closes. The rebirth he seeks is uncertain, but the attempt is real. The song captures that painful contrast between what we are and what we were. Adults drowning in guilt, while the children, untouched for now, still laugh in the distance.
Eversky
Threaded through the EP is the concept of ‘Eversky,’ an imagined place beyond oppression, where the skies never close in. Where the sky is the limit. In the context of the EP, Eversky is not just a utopia but a belief; a state of soul where even in devastation, the spirit can look upward. It’s the horizon oppressed people keep walking toward, even when the ground is scorched beneath them.
The sampled clip at the beginning makes one mostly incensed.
“The occupation is starving us. We don’t find water, food, and we drink from the unusable water. We come now to shout and invite you to protect us. We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children. We want medicine, food, and education, and we want to live as the other children live.”
A group of children spoke to reporters outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the main medical complex in the bombarded territory, and one of the kids said that. There are numerous clips floating around social media, all of them depressing. I (read Tawanda) recently saw one of a 10-year-old boy who was asked what he wishes for, and he said “death,” without hesitation. It broke my heart that the world allowed that to happen.
The word Eversky combines “ever” (meaning eternal, ongoing, without end) and “sky” (a universal symbol for freedom, vastness, transcendence). So linguistically, it evokes something like “an everlasting sky”, a place or state where there are no limits, no oppression.
Eversky can represent a utopian dream. A world beyond suffering or systemic injustice, where people can finally breathe and exist freely. It can also be a metaphysical refuge, not necessarily a real place, but a mental, spiritual, or emotional escape from the brutality of reality. And it can be a collective symbol of hope or resistance, similar to how “Zion,” “Heaven,” or “The Promised Land” have been used in history.
For the oppressed, Eversky could be that imagined horizon. The hope that keeps them fighting, creating, or surviving. It’s not naive idealism, but a form of defiance: believing in something pure and boundless even when the world below is burning.
It’s poignant that the end of the song is a sample of “Ehuhwee nyarara mwana,” a lullaby for children to soothe them to sleep. Peace. Powerful imagery.
My Kids
By the time ‘My Kids’ arrives, MUTSA has led us through the full spectrum of grief: from horror to heartbreak to endurance. ‘My Kids’ feels like the emotional exhale. It begins with a timestamp: “20 Jan, my granny died, 96 years, what a life, saw my daddy cry.” It’s a small line, but it collapses history into a single moment. Generations overlap—grandmother, father, son—and in that overlap, MUTSA contemplates legacy: how love, like grief, is inherited.
The song becomes a conversation with time, with the ancestors, with the future. When he repeats “my kids,” it’s not just about literal children; it’s about everything we nurture; music, memory, community.
Those words “I don’t think the children are stupid. And I don’t think I have to hold back what I’m trying to say. So I tell the story” at the beginning of the song were said by Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.
She said this in an interview where she was explaining why she writes honestly about apartheid, injustice, and the moral complexities of South African society—even when her audience includes young readers. Gordimer believed that children could handle truth and deserved honesty in storytelling.
We do think people question artists that do heavy themes too much. Whether such themes are “too heavy” for children or young listeners/readers. Whether that is enjoyable. MUTSA probably gets that a lot. We think this song is in part a response to that criticism. He will say what needs to be said.
So he rejects that idea. He believes that children are not naïve or ignorant about what is happening around them, and that pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
His storytelling must confront reality, even when it’s uncomfortable. He refuses to dilute his message for the sake of “protecting” listeners or entertaining, arguing instead that "my kids" deserve to hear real stories because they are living through those realities themselves.
MUTSA channels that same refusal to look away. His songs become storytelling as resistance. A sonic documentation of pain that demands remembrance.
What makes this EP so powerful is MUTSA’s restraint. The samples (for what is a MUTSA project without samples?)—Mansour’s voice, the children’s laughter, PBS documentary, Rejoice's story, Palestinian children—are not background; they are the story.
By the end of The Children Are Always Ours, there is no catharsis. No contradictions are resolved. There’s only memory. Painful memory. A refusal to forget. MUTSA doesn’t offer closure because there is none. But he does offer witness. And in a world that keeps trying to move on, to scroll past, to silence. Witness is everything.
The children are always ours, he reminds us. Even when we fail them. Even when they’re gone. Even when the sky falls. The world is ours together. It this message of global solidarity that matters more than anything else.
EP Rating - 8.6/10
You can stream The Children Are Always Ours by MUTSA via this link.
0 Comments