UK: GoFundMe appeal for late Bhundu Boys legend exceeds £8,000 target; Kagona died at Scotland home

By Entertainment Correspondent

UK: A GoFundMe appeal to raise funeral and body repatriation funds for the late Bhundu Boys legend, Rise Kagona, has exceeded its £8,000 target with organisers saying “it’s amazed us how fast our target has been reached”.

As of Tuesday, this week, the appeal had raised £9,238.

“Thank you all so much for the donations,” said organisers Andy Cooke, Doug Veitch and Joyce Juma-Phiri.

“The family are choosing between quotes just now; the repatriation costs do seem to be around £8000, which was a lucky guess.

“It will take some time to get the paperwork together, and so we think repatriation and Rise’s funeral in Harare is still weeks away.”

They added, “We’d like to keep the fund open a little longer – with your blessing – we’d use any left-over funds to help the family with costs at their end.

“They expect a very large number of people will attend the funeral in Harare!

“Rise’s children Sandra, Clever, Christian are so, so grateful for what we’ve been able to raise!”

Kagona, founder member of the great Zimbabwean boy band who popified Chimurenga music and took it to the world stage, died at his home in Scotland on the 14^th of September.

“Rise had a cough that wouldn’t go away for several months, and he also started noticing shortness of breath,” reads a post by Andy Cooke on the Rise Kagona’s Jit Jive music Facebook page.

“These were warning signs of very high blood pressure and a damaged heart. He was in hospital for a week, and returned home on the 12th feeling a little better.

“However, worried that he hadn’t responded to us on Saturday, I visited, and found him dead, most likely by a sudden heart attack.”

Cooke and some of Kagona’s friends organised the fundraiser to help cover the costs of repatriating his body to Zimbabwe.

“… we had reassured his family that his community of friends in the UK would cover these costs, as a last loving show of appreciation of Rise and his achievements in music,” Cooke explained.

Kagona went from worldwide fame to not having a roof over his head.

At the height of their fame, the Bhundu Boys supported Madonna in 1987 and played to 240,000 fans over three nights at Wembley in London.

The rise of the Bhundu Boys had been meteoric, but the band’s fall would be equally dramatic.

Their world would fall apart in a blizzard of disagreements, bad luck, poor management and tragedy as bandmates succumbed to Aids, mental illness and suicide.

In 1990, lead singer Biggie Tembo was asked to leave the band and, five years later, he hanged himself in a psychiatric hospital.

The Bhundu Boys continued but there was more grief when bandmates David Mankaba, Shepherd Munyama and Shakespeare Kangwena all died of Aids-related diseases.