She crossed ten African countries in a Land Rover and called herself a girl from Harare everywhere she stopped. The music she made during that time is still waiting for the industry to catch up with it.
In December 2018, Gemma Griffiths packed her instruments, a mini recording studio, and a small box of clothes into a black Land Rover Defender and said goodbye to everyone she knew. She and South African filmmaker Marc Neilson had a plan that most people would describe as either deeply romantic or completely impractical. Drive across Africa. Write an album on the road. See what happens.
500 days. 24,000 kilometres. Ten countries.
Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, Namibia, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique. From the mists of Victoria Falls to the tropical islands of Zanzibar, from the Namibian desert sand to the dripping rainforests of Bwindi in Uganda. They lived in the vehicle. They met musicians on the road and connected with them. Gemma wrote while moving, recorded in campsites and hotel rooms and parking lots, collected sounds from every landscape the Defender rolled through.
The Land Rover even got a name. Pamwe. Shona for “together.” Because that’s what the journey was.
What came out the other side was not just an album. It was the clearest proof that any Zimbabwean artist has offered in recent years that the most internationally competitive sound Zimbabwe has comes directly from being honest about where you are from. Not from chasing what’s working in Lagos. Not from smoothing the Shona out of the music so that it travels easier. From going deeper into who you are and trusting that the world will find its way to you.
The tragedy is that Zimbabwe largely let that sound go quiet. But we’ll get to that.
Who she is, before the music
Gemma Griffiths was born in Cape Town on 1 September 1994, but she grew up in Harare. Chisipite Senior School. The suburbs. A city she would spend her entire adult life trying to carry with her everywhere she went.
Her family was musical from both sides. Her grandmother was a classically trained pianist. Her grandfather played the clarinet. Her mother was a music teacher. Growing up, the household was full of Oliver Mtukudzi coming from speakers in different rooms. She started writing poetry and turning it into songs in junior school. By the time she was old enough to properly pursue music, she was already multi-instrumental, playing piano, trumpet, saxophone, guitar and keyboard.
She earned a trumpet scholarship to Snow College in Utah, where she studied commercial music composition. Then Cape Town, performing in bars five nights a week, sleeping on couches, doing the things you have to do when you’re building something from scratch in a city that doesn’t know your name yet. She shared stages with Freshly Ground, Goodluck, Matthew Mole. She performed with Jah Prayzah at the Kirstenbosch Summer Concerts. She shared the stage with the late Oliver Mtukudzi at Artscape Theatre.
But she kept coming home. HIFA. Miombo Magic. Shoko Festival. She performed at Zimfest in London in 2015 and again in 2019. She performed at the Mahogany Sessions in the UK. She performed at Sofar Sounds London. Wherever she went, she introduced herself the same way.
“Harare is my heartbeat,” she told Rolling Stone Africa in 2025. “No matter where I was, when people asked where I was from, I always led with that.”
That consistency of self-identification is not a small thing. It is the whole character of what makes Gemma interesting. Because she is a white Zimbabwean. And in a country where the question of who gets to claim what has never been simple, she wore her identity on her sleeve without hedging it, without softening it, without appending a disclaimer. A girl from Harare. Zimbabwean. African. Shona in her spirit if not in her blood. She spoke the language fluently, she moved through Harare’s music culture from the inside, she worked at Chillspot Records in Mbare. She didn’t seek permission to belong. She already did.
She acknowledged the complexity of this in a 2024 interview with Trevor Ncube: “I think as a white woman in a black music space, coming up through Zimdancehall, there was a lot of privilege that came with my race. But I do owe everything to Zimdancehall, to Zim music culture. To people like Winky D, and Fanton Levels at Chillspot Records who gave me a chance and a space and a voice.” And then she said the thing that matters most: “Before anything else I am Zimbabwean.”
Many people in her position choose the more comfortable, more internationally legible identity. They soften the Zimbabwean and amplify the global. Gemma did the opposite. And the music she made during the period when she most committed to that choice is the most original sound Zimbabwe’s acoustic space has produced in the streaming era.
The cover that changed everything
Before the Defender, before Pamwe, before any of the things that made Gemma matter to this conversation, there was a piano at the Zimbabwe Achievers Awards in London.
It was 2016. She performed a haunting ballad version of Winky D’s Musarova Bigman on a grand piano, singing in Shona and English. The original song was Zimdancehall, uptempo, built for a very specific energy. Gemma took it apart and rebuilt it as a slow, intimate piece of acoustic storytelling. The video went viral.
Think about what was happening in that moment. A white Zimbabwean woman, alone at a piano in London, singing Shona in a voice that had no trepidation in it whatsoever. No performance of a language she was borrowing. Just singing, the way you sing music that grew up inside you. The way Zimbabweans in the diaspora who watched that video responded tells you everything about the emotional impact. She wasn’t doing an impression of their culture. She was part of it.
Years passed. Then her phone rang.
Winky D. He invited her to sit in his car. He played her the beat for MuGarden and they recorded it over two nights. The song tells an Adam and Eve story set in Zimbabwe and was released on Valentine’s Day 2019. It broke Zimbabwe’s record for the fastest YouTube views in the country’s history. It reached the top five on BBC Radio 1Xtra’s Afrobeats chart and number one on Kiss TV’s UK Afrobeats video chart. It appeared on the Nigerian charts. It gave Zimbabwean music a moment of genuine international visibility at a time when the country was largely invisible in the global music conversation.
“He taught me the value of patience and precision in music,” she said about working with Winky D. “That song changed everything. It opened doors to the Zim Dancehall scene and changed the trajectory of my career.”
Winky D described her vocals during the filming process as “angelic.” The video, which casts them as Adam and Eve in a reimagined Zimbabwean garden, works precisely because neither of them is performing anything. They both just are what they are. The song holds together on the weight of that authenticity.
But MuGarden, despite everything it achieved, is not the most interesting part of Gemma’s career. It is actually the moment where the most interesting part of her career became harder to build, because the door it opened led somewhere specific.
The Defender, the road, and the sound that came back
The Land Rover trip was already underway when MuGarden happened. Gemma and Marc Neilson had set off from Cape Town in December 2018, a few months before the Valentine’s Day release. The two things are parallel chapters, not sequential ones.
The road trip was called Driving Pamwe. The idea was simple and enormous at the same time: drive across Africa, share the stories of the people and places they encountered, write music inside that experience, record it in the vehicle. They lived in the Defender. They navigated the Quirimba Archipelago off the coast of Mozambique. They moved through Uganda’s Bwindi impenetrable forest. They sat in the dusty roads of Namibia. They drove through Zimbabwean city streets and turned the camera on familiar things with the fresh eyes of someone who had been away and was seeing home for what it actually is.
“I was recording, collecting sounds, and writing what would become Pamwe and A Girl From Harare,” she said. “That phrase, the girl from Harare, really stuck.”
The Pamwe EP, released in December 2020 through The Orchard, is what came directly out of that period. Five tracks. Produced by Charlie Kay, who had been her long-time creative collaborator. The sound is described everywhere as acoustic soul, and that label is accurate but incomplete. What it actually sounds like, to a Zimbabwean ear, is something that has a specific texture. The jangling guitar and textured acoustic percussion. The voice over it without any artifice. The production that knows exactly how much space to leave.
Ndinewe is the most important song on the record. Shona for “I am with you.” It was released on day 500 of the trip, and the music video that Marc Neilson shot doubles as a visual diary of the whole journey. Uganda’s rainforests. Tanzania’s beaches. Dusty Namibia. Zimbabwean city streets. Rural Malawi. South African rivers. And Gemma moving through all of it like someone who belongs to this continent and knows it.
The piece one writer described as “a craft of well-blended notes, emotionally whispering a twang of guitar chains, coupled with a keyboard tang” hit 70,000 views in under four days. More importantly, it connected emotionally in a way that exceeded its streaming numbers. People in the diaspora were sharing it the way you share something that makes you feel seen. Not entertained. Seen.
Then 263 came. Named after Zimbabwe’s international dialling code. Featuring Nutty O and Asaph. This is the most strategically underrated moment in Gemma’s entire catalogue because of what it demonstrated. Two of the most recognisable names in ZimHipHop chose to come into her production world. Not the other way around. Gemma didn’t go into a Nutty O session and add a hook. Nutty O came into an acoustic soul context built around a very specifically Zimbabwean guitar sound and gave it everything. Asaph did the same.
That is how genre-building works from the inside. When artists of serious standing in adjacent scenes choose to step into your sound and make it feel natural, that’s when a sound starts to become a movement. Gemma in 2020 was on that trajectory. She was pulling the culture toward her rather than chasing it.
What the sound was and why it mattered internationally
This part needs to be said clearly because it is the core of why Pamwe matters beyond just being good music.
The guitar on those recordings doesn’t sound like Lagos. It doesn’t sound like the Johannesburg sessions market. It sits in a tradition that runs from Oliver Mtukudzi through Andy Brown, the Zimbabwean acoustic music lineage that has always had emotional depth and cultural specificity but has never been given a global platform proportionate to its quality. What Gemma was doing was translating that tradition into contemporary acoustic soul production clean enough for a Spotify editorial playlist in Stockholm, while keeping the cultural fingerprint intact.
Her influences on the record were Amy Winehouse and Lianne La Havas on one side, and Mtukudzi and Andy Brown on the other. Tuku himself was her mentor. She talked about him in every interview for years, about the time he made for young musicians, about how he was “a father of our sound.” That lineage is real and it shows in the music.
A listener in London or New York who had never been to Zimbabwe could play Ndinewe and feel something shift, that specific sensation of encountering a sound that is completely honest about where it came from, a sound you haven’t heard before that somehow still feels familiar. That is the quality that breaks through geographically. Not novelty. Honesty.
Tyla didn’t explain Amapiano to the world. She played it and trusted the log drums and the dance and the South African DNA to carry themselves. Gemma in 2020 was doing the same thing for a Zimbabwean acoustic soul sound. Not explaining it. Just playing it. Just being the girl from Harare, completely and without apology, and letting the music make the case.
2020 Gemma was a dream. For those who caught Pamwe in real time, it felt like watching something rare take shape. An album you could happily score in a film about Zimbabwe and its wildness, its wide skies and the specific beauty of its landscapes. Victoria Falls in the background. A Kariba sunset. The quality of light in Harare’s jacaranda season. That is not a small thing to carry in a piece of music. Most music can’t do it.
What happened next
MuGarden’s success did what big commercial successes do. It opened a door into a lane with better short-term commercial visibility. The dancehall and Afropop space that Winky D occupied was one of the most commercially active in Zimbabwean music. Once she’d had a number one on the BBC Afrobeats chart and broken YouTube view records in Zimbabwe, the pressure of that success shaped what came after.
The direction shifted. Not dramatically or all at once. But over the period from 2020 to 2025, the acoustic soul fingerprint of Pamwe got quieter. The collaborations diversified. The production register moved toward contemporary Afropop. She worked with Prince Kaybee. She collaborated with Baba Harare. She remained active and visible and genuinely growing as an artist and performer. She toured. She did eleven shows across Zimbabwe in 2022. She performed in Dubai and toured with Alick Macheso in Australia.
In May 2025, she released her self-titled debut full album, Gemma, ten years in the making. ZimSphere reviewed it warmly, calling it sounds “reminiscent of her work on Pamwe EP and The Girl From Harare EP, yet better honed.” Rolling Stone Africa named her one of their Future of Music cover stars. The album has strong moments. Gold, the love letter to Harare, has that direct emotional address that her best writing always carries. The album is polished and mature and personal.
But it doesn’t sound like Pamwe sounds. It doesn’t have the guitar that screams Harare’s suburbs. It doesn’t carry Victoria Falls in the background. It is excellent contemporary Afropop from an artist with a decade of experience, and it could have been made by a number of artists across the continent who are very good at what they do.
That is the honest review. Not that Gemma in 2025 is a bad artist. She isn’t. But Gemma in 2020 was making music nobody else was making. And Gemma in 2025 is making music that many very good people are making. The irreplaceability of the Pamwe sound has not been replaced. It has been set aside.
She still knows it. She told Rolling Stone Africa that she’d love to collaborate with Thomas Mapfumo, that she sees “so much power in merging tradition with modernity and to be part of that bridge would be something I’d carry with pride.” The instinct is still there. The sound is still in her. The question is whether she goes back for it.
What this story means for Zimbabwean music
Gemma’s arc is not a story of failure. It is a story about what happens when Zimbabwe produces something genuinely original and the industry around it doesn’t build the infrastructure to sustain that originality.
She said it herself in the Trevor Ncube interview: “I owe so much of my journey to Zimbabwean music culture and to Zimdancehall. To people like Winky D, and Fanton Levels at Chillspot Records who gave me a chance and a space and a voice.” She found her first major platform in Zimdancehall, not in the acoustic soul space. When the biggest door opened, it opened in the direction of the genre that was already commercially established, not the one she was building from scratch.
There is no space in Zimbabwe that champions acoustic soul the way Zimdancehall is championed. No radio station that positions it. No cultural ecosystem that helps an artist in that space build momentum the way that hip hop and dancehall have their own ecosystems. When MuGarden connected and pulled Gemma toward an already-existing infrastructure, there was no equivalent infrastructure pulling her back toward what Pamwe was building.
The girls Gemma named for Rolling Stone Africa as ones to watch from Zimbabwe, Young Gemini, Oliander, Nisha T, Atenda Chinx, Kyla Blac. Are any of them picking up the acoustic soul thread that Pamwe started? Is anyone extending the 263 blueprint, the one where acoustic soul and ZimHipHop exist in the same production space and both are better for it?
These are the questions the industry should be asking.
Because the sound existed. It was internationally competitive. It was honest about Zimbabwe in a way that international audiences respond to when they encounter something they’ve never heard before. It had collaborators coming to it rather than it chasing collaborators.
And it is still waiting to be built into something.
The phrase she kept repeating
Through all of it, through Cape Town and Utah and the Defender crossing Namibia and the BBC chart and London and Dubai and now touring across North America, one phrase keeps showing up in every interview, every piece of text Gemma has written about herself, every caption, every answer to every question about where she is from.
Harare is my heartbeat.
Not “I grew up in Zimbabwe.” Not “I have strong connections to Zimbabwe.” Not the softened, internationally palatable version that would have been available to her and that many people in her position would have used.
Harare is my heartbeat.
For a white Zimbabwean woman in an industry that would have been perfectly happy to let her be simply a South African-based acoustic artist with some Shona influences, that claim is a statement. There are plenty of people who grew up in Harare’s suburbs and left and found ways to not be fully Zimbabwean in their presentation, especially once they started building international careers. Gemma went the other direction. The further she got from Harare geographically, the louder she said it.
That’s what made the Pamwe era feel like it did. You were listening to someone who had everything to lose by being completely honest about where she came from and chose to do it anyway. On a road through Uganda. Through Mozambique’s islands. Through Namibia’s desert. Through every landscape the Defender rolled through.
And the music sounded exactly like a girl from Harare.
It still does, underneath everything. It’s still there.
HOT100 Zimbabwe is Zimbabwe’s national music ranking and music intelligence platform. This article forms part of the HOT100 cultural intelligence series, examining the forces and figures shaping Zimbabwean music’s domestic and international identity.
