In April of 1980, when Bob Marley arrived to headline the independence
celebrations that would see Rhodesia become Zimbabwe, his song
“Zimbabwe,” the centerpiece of the “Survival” album, was the most
popular foreign song in the country. Marley, whose religion of
Rastafarianism had long preached cultural and political resistance
against white oppression in Africa, wanted to “build a blood-claat
studio inna Africa, have hit after blood-claat hit”—so much so that he
spent thousands of dollars flying lighting and sound equipment to
Zimbabwe to create a concert atmosphere that would match that of Madison
Square Garden.
In Zimbabwe, popular songs were central to the century-long fight to end
the colonial system, and Marley’s claim that music was “the biggest gun
because the oppressed cannot afford weapons” was nowhere more resonant.
After Marley’s performance that night, when he shed tears watching the
Rhodesian flag come down and Zimbabwe’s go up, the local musician Thomas
Mapfumo took the stage. Mapfumo was a leading singer of chimurenga music, the music of struggle. Never mind that it was late, and that
Prince Charles and all the other foreign dignitaries and top-ranking
army officers—the nation’s new V.I.P.s—had left. The freedom fighters
stayed behind, waving their guns. Peasants who had been locked out of
the main event joined in dancing to the chimurenga music until the
next morning.
I spoke with Professor Mickias Musiyiwa, of the University of Zimbabwe,
who told me that chimurenga music continues to be “one platform that
Zimbabweans always resort to whenever they want to express their
grievances against their leaders and against Western imperialism.” The
word comes from the name of Murenga, an early ancestor and warrior of
the Shona people. In Zimbabwe’s liberation war, of the nineteen-sixties
and seventies, the military wings of guerrillas based in Mozambique and
Zambia set up choirs to sing chimurenga songs that derived from folk
hymns. These hymns connected the living with the world of the ancestors
and recorded the struggle for those to come. Revolutionaries played
these songs at rallies held in urban areas and at all-night vigils
called mapungwes, where guerrillas and peasants would come together to
sing.
Songs like “Muka, Muka!” (“Wake Up, Wake Up!”) and “Tumira Vana Kuhondo”
(“Mothers Send Your Children to War”) were sung to politicize and
educate Zimbabweans about why the war for independence was being fought.
“The song became the classroom, so to speak, just like in South Africa
and in Kenya, through which people could access information of what was
happening in different parts of the country,” Maurice Vambe, a professor
of African literature at the University of South Africa, explained to
me. The songs could also correct a historical narrative. Songs such as
“Vakawuya Zimbabwe” (“They Came to Zimbabwe”) narrated the exploitation
of Zimbabwe and sought to revive old stories about pre-colonial times.
Much like reggae would seek to do, the music was making contemporary
social commentary and preserving ancient cultural memory.
Although Thomas Mapfumo was not among the guerrillas in Mozambique and
Zambia, his music championed the war for independence, leading to his
detention and multiple arrests. His popularity as the leading chimurenga musician was fuelled by his band’s adaption of the mbira, a
thumb piano that is central to Shona spiritual communication. By using a
traditional instrument—particularly one with ties to ancestor worship—Mapfumo was signalling his participation in acultural revolution against colonial rule.
In the first half-decade after Zimbabwe won its independence, Mapfumo,
like other chimurenga musicians, would sing songs like “Mabasa”
(“Let’s Get Back to Work”), about the need for unity in order to build
the new nation. But, as the eighties turned to the nineties, the tone of
his music changed. In 1988, his song “Corruption” brought to the
national airwaves the whispered frustrations heard in private offices,
marketplaces, and homes about the unequal distribution of the nation’s
wealth. The outcry wasn’t, as we might assume, for the former President Robert
Mugabe and other leaders to step aside. “People were not really thinking
about issues of succession,” Musiyiwa explained. Most citizens, having
recently made personal sacrifices for the new nation, were instead
demanding a redirection. “People now were beginning to say this is not
what we fought for,” Musiyiwa said. “They lost their lives in order to
build a society in which everyone benefits. In which services are
provided.”
Mapfumo, who is now seventy-two, will return to his country later this month
after ten years of self-imposed exile, in Oregon, as a persona non grata
of the Mugabe regime. He once explained that “independence in Zimbabwe
brought much-needed freedom but triggered other unexpected
tribulations.” Chimurenga, he wrote, has shifted to focus on the
“elimination of public office corruption while advocating for the
citizen’s pursuit of peace, happiness, equality, dignity, comfort and
the rule of law.” Music as a weapon in the hands of the people has been
turned against the old revolutionaries. Mapfumo’s “Maiti Kurima
Hamubvire” (“You Used to Say You Are Good Farmers”), to take one
example, touches on the failure of the national government to make land
reform work and lists its other broken promises. But the ruling class
was not blind to the power of chimurenga. To counter the popular
music, the government started holding galas during national holidays, in
the early aughts. The goal, as a former minister of information and
publicity told the state-owned daily newspaper the Herald, was for “a
new form of Press statement” that “whipped people into common liberation
thinking and kept them informed, educated and united.”
On Tuesday, November 21, 2017, when Robert Mugabe resigned from
his position as President, onlookers on the streets of Harare cheered on
a solitary young man in a red bucket hat, who played a song called
“Kutonga Kwaro” on a trombone. Although the song was released just a
week before the protests had started, it had been adopted as the
unofficial anthem of the uprising. In the marches that saw the
fall of Mugabe, and at the inauguration of his
former Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, “Kutonga Kwaro” was blaring
from thousands of cars in the streets and on radios everywhere. The song
talks about the coming of a familiar but long-awaited hero, a fearsome
character before whom other men cringe, one who will change the rules,
open the granary.
But is ‘Kutonga Kwaro’ true chimurenga music? The song was written
by Jah Prayzah, who has spent most of his career as a brand ambassador
of the Zimbabwe Defense Forces (Z.D.F.). Accordingly, the lyrics of his
music extoll the military strongman, and he styles himself in military fatigues and apparel. It has been dangerous in the last
decade to sing or produce chimurenga music that criticizes the state;
Mapfumo and his family faced physical threats before fleeing the
country. Prayzah’s music embodies the paradox of Zimbabwe’s revolution.
The military affiliation has protected his right to free speech, to sing
for a new day, but such protection is only necessary because of the
rigid and censored society that the military has created.
Zimbabweans have had mixed reactions to the military’s involvement in
the removal of Mugabe and the precedent that it sets. One prominent
Zimbabwean blogger, who was derided for taking a picture with a soldier
while standing next to an army tanker, wrote about how big a deal it was
to feel safe for once around the soldiers. Zimbabweans have been told
for decades that they owe their liberation to these soldiers and the
military, but the military had yet to show any concern for the will of
the people until now. Mapfumo’s anti-Mugabe song “Masoja Nemapurisa”
(“Father, If Soldiers and Police Refuse to Beat People, What Will You
Do?”) feels prophetic. But, with the leadership connected to Mugabe
still in charge, he concedes,
“It’s still the old train that we’re riding but they’ve got a different
driver.” Soldiers seizing power is nothing new, but the change in power,
for a few weeks, suggested a return to the state of affairs that was
interrupted by colonialism—a time and space when Africans have the
greatest say in the use of their land and the formation of their
culture. In that sense, what’s happening in Zimbabwe is another verse in
the longer song of struggle, where the past is always present and the
future available to be fought for.
Sourse: newyorker.com
