- African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe by Mhoze Chikowero
In African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero provides a new history of music in Zimbabwe by using rich African sources. Relying on colonial archives, he carefully dissects music and colonialism that date back to the 1890s. He points out that the publication “emerges out of a life, an upbringing, conversations, and studying in the school of the Madzimbabwe every day and the school that came” (p. ix).
The well-written and informative book “drew energy from the contemporary iterations of the performative madariro, from the self-crafted fringes of urban joy—kwamereki—to the nodes of indigenous knowledge regeneration such as the Mbira Centre, Dzimbanhete, Pakare Paye, Nharira, and the urbane, polite Jazz 105 (what tragedy ever shut down that splendid joint?)” (p. ix). The central figures in the publication are the artists, most of whom over the years befriended the author.
Apart from acknowledgments and an introduction, titled “Cross-Cultural Encounters: Songs, Power, and Being,” this book is divided into ten chapters. An epilogue deals with postcolonial legacies, song, power, and knowledge production; copious notes, a selected bibliography, a discography, and an index follow. Readers will benefit tremendously from several indigenous themes, including aspects of missionary witchcraft (chapter one), singing to purge “heathens” (chapter two), criminalizing African musical cultures (chapter three), African urban “re/creation” (chapter four), tribal dancing (chapter five), performing and contesting colonial modernity (chapter six), the song “Skokiaan” (chapter seven), uses of the past (chapter eight), cultures of resistance (chapter nine), and Jane Lungile Ngwenya (chapter ten).
In the realm of Madzimbabwe and related cultures, Chikowero shows how musical contexts reflect “people’s shared cognitive forms and societal values, and their associated behaviors and underlying moral codes and [End Page 150] concepts” (p. 1, quoting Ngugi 1997). He adds that “music is a vector of communication not only amongst the living, but also between the living and the world of the ancestors, nyikadzimu” (p. 1).
In terms of purging, “heathens” and their songs come to mind. For example, the Reverend John B. Radasi was a Zulu missionary, who in 1903 established the Bembesi Mission Station in Matabeleland. As a boy, he had gone “to America with a group of musicians, and there he converted to Christianity” (p. 56). For deeper knowledge of Christianity, he “re-crossed the Atlantic, travelling on to Edinburgh, where he enrolled as a student of theology” (p. 56).
Where architectures of control are concerned, the spotlight is on African urban “re/creation.” Chikowero quotes an epigraph from Ray E. Phillips’s The Bantu in the City (1937). A saying that has become commonplace in Western countries was that “Whoever captures the leisure time of the people, gets the people” (p. 112). At times, in the 1930s, “the height of colonial expropriation and enclosure had begun to squeeze and dismember the African family in the rural reserves” (p. 112).
In the epilogue, Chikowero offers food for thought, beginning with a discussion of a useful citation from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s 1968 book, The Wretched of the Earth. With the quote, as underscored by Chikowero, Sartre “aptly captured the psychological impact of colonialism when he wrote that the condition of the colonized is a nervous condition” (p. 293). Readers learn that “much of the historiography on missionary evangelization emphasizes both the mission’s denominational heterogeneity and its doctrinal unity of purpose” (p. 294).
In the end, readers learn that “more of these songs were also imported by the guerrillas and diffused amongst rural and urban populations through mapungwe, whose repertoires the young would-be guerrillas like [Jonathan] Murandu also imitated” (p. 303). Most certainly, African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe will benefit ethnomusicologists as well as multimedia experts and general readers. Chikowero makes a tremendous contribution to African music in general and, indeed, ethnomusicology in particular.