Stoney to receive Lifetime Achievement at NAMAs

By Confidente Reporter

ONE of Zambezi region’s most beloved and revered musical powerhouses, Stoney Mubiana, who passed away in 2003, remains one of the country’s most celebrated artists to date in as far as creativity and conscious music is concerned.

As one of Namibia’s musical fathers and a versatile musical architect who started his career at the stroke of Independence, Stoney was a popular performer on the live music circuit with a rare talent at the time and the NAMAs executive committee thus deemed him fit to receive the Lifetime Achievement  Award come September.

Mubiana combined traditional music with modern instrumentation and blended the Kizomba genre with African beats. Together with his musical heavyweights at the time, he became renowned for publishing backing tracks for many local adverts.

Highly determined, Stoney was always ready to hit the music scene with his African rhythm and disco music. He rubbed shoulders with continental heavyweights, earning nominations in the Africa Song Competition for his song ‘Mama Wa Ka’. Thus he made music for Africa and the world.

“In a country like ours with many cultural groups, you have to play a variety of music in order to satisfy the different tastes,” Stoney Mubiana famously said.

Stoney, who during his time encouraged women to join the music industry, was one of the trailblazers who was determined to push Namibian music and grow the industry, which was still in its infant stage.

The burning passion for music that lived in him led him to quit his fulltime job to allow him to further his knowledge of music. In 1990, he moved to Windhoek where he studied composition and music theory and also mastered the art of the keyboard.

Mubiana later became a senior music librarian at the national broadcaster (NBC) and a member of the board of directors of the Namibia Society of Composers and Authors of Music (NASCAM). His contribution to the Namibian music industry was truly instrumental and represents an invaluable contribution that helped ignite the local music scene.