Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (review)

Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. By Thomas Turino. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [x, 401 p. ISBN 0-226-81701-6 (cloth); 0-226-81702-4 (pbk.). $50 (cloth); $22 (pbk.).]

Turino offers a fresh, provocative, and ultimately most convincing reading of the development of popular music in Zimbabwe. He challenges a number of widely accepted orthodoxies, presenting insights that will significantly affect future analysis of popular culture in southern Africa and, more generally, understanding of the relationships between ruling elites and impoverished majorities throughout Africa. Always maintaining a respectful tone toward the positions he critiques, Turino provides an empirically detailed, localized answer to transnational questions. In this review, I am able to indicate only a few of the contributions made by this important book.

The foundational premise of Turino's analytical framework is that black Zimbabweans following foreign modes of thinking and being constitute a separate group from their compatriots who remain connected to "indigenous lifeways"--precolonial lifestyle, culture, and religion. He categorizes as "cosmopolitans" local people who have deeply internalized foreign ideas and practices (p. 8): those whose purview is simultaneously local and translocal. In Zimbabwe, colonial missionization and education created a cosmopolitan, black middle class that led the African nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has controlled the postcolonial state since 1980.

Turino finds more continuities than differences between colonial, African nationalist, and postcolonial approaches to music, for they are all fundamentally driven by the same cosmopolitan principles. One concept they share is "modernist reformism": the idea that a new culture should be forged as a synthesis of the best of local "traditional" cultures and foreign "modern" lifeways and technologies. Frequently, modernist reform results in the transformation of distinctive local arts according to cosmopolitan ethics and aesthetics, simultaneously facilitating transformation of indigenous local participatory musics into nationally and internationally salable products, and amateur musicians into professionals. It is this process and its effects on musical style and practice that Turino seeks to trace.

After discussing his theoretical framework in part 1, Turino addresses the history of Zimbabwean popular music chronologically in four remaining sections. In part 2, he examines the rise of urban popular music under colonialism. Focusing on indigenous musical culture in the capital's main township, he discusses the main dances performed and challenges the widely held perception that the mbira dza Vadzimu experienced a period of decline during colonial rule and a revival under African nationalism. Rather, he contends that playing this particular mbira had always been a small-scale tradition that surged in popularity as a result of radio exposure during the early 1960s. Similarly, he suggests that the proliferation of dance groups during the 1960s was not primarily attributable to African nationalism, but to the new perception that money could be earned by dancing, thanks to the advent of government, municipal, and other paid engagements.

Turino's representation of the relationships between indigenous music and colonial centers of power during the Federation years (1953-63) is equally challenging to popular belief: projects and approaches usually attributed to African nationalism are shown to have started under the liberal colonial banner of "racial partnership" (p. 94). Together, members of the black middle class and white liberals instigated projects designed to preserve and develop indigenous arts within the state-controlled media and municipalities, churches, and educational institutions. Also discussed in relation to cosmopolitanism are the musics patronized by the black middle class: choral music, makwaya, the "concert" tradition, tsaba-tsaba, dance-band music, and ballroom dancing.

The overt musical expression of nationalism and the use of music to facilitate the black middle class's political realignment with the masses during the rise of African nationalism is the focus of part 3. In mass rallies, nationalist leaders used indigenous music to express and emotionalize the abstract concept of nation. During the independence war in the 1970s, tactics of the Zimbabwe African National Union prioritized politicization of the peasantry, a task largely accomplished...