From an All Night Ceremony to the World Music Stage

The mbira dzavadzimu remains in active ceremonial use among Shona communities in Zimbabwe and neighbouring Shona speaking areas of Mozambique, and Bourdillon's study documents the bira ceremony as a genuinely living institution rather than a historical survival, continuing to structure how many Shona families address illness, misfortune or unresolved matters believed to involve ancestral concern.

From the 1960s onward the instrument also reached a substantial audience well beyond Zimbabwe through the work of musicians and scholars, notably Dumisani Maraire, who taught mbira in the United States and helped establish it as a subject of serious ethnomusicological study and popular performance internationally. This international attention has occasionally raised questions within Shona communities about the instrument's ceremonial music being performed as concert entertainment outside its ritual context, a tension common to many instruments that carry both a specific sacred function at home and a growing secular audience abroad, though the mbira's central ceremonial role within Shona spiritual life has continued alongside this wider international interest rather than being displaced by it.