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

Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe, by Thomas Turino. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. 401 pp. ISBN 0-226-81702-4 paper.

The development of commercial industrial metropolises in the southern African region during the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) gave rise to the influx of migrant labor from rural outbelts to the urban townships. When migrant laborers arrived from these labor colonies that supplied the mining and manufacturing industries of the federation, they brought their bodies and their cultures. Their music, dance, and theater became the raw material of a new kind of cultural production and, as such, vehicles of adaptation to the urban environment. The process of adaptation is not the mere conversion of the rural to the urban; it also means immersion into the capitalist economy. Thomas Turino's book situates itself in the relationship that evolved between the indigenous and the cosmopolitan/global in the development of musical professionalism in Zimbabwe. The relationship between the cultural institutions of transnational capital (the entertainment industry) and indigenous Third World cultural expressions demonstrates the tendency of hegemonic institutions to absorb and control Third World images and the tendency of these images to puncture popular notions of pleasure. In this collaboration there is tension between the ideological frame of reference represented by the agency of transnational capitalism and that of indigenous cultural expression born out of local traditions and a culture of resistance to colonial subjugation.

The first part of the book discusses the use of mbira music, which is used for ritual possession. The author explains how this practice evolved from uncompensated collaboration to music being played in return for gifts and then finally to contracts for money. He discusses how professionalism in this region's music industry began to emerge in the 1950s with the institution of cultural programs and social alliances under the federation, and how these programs enhanced the spread of cosmopolitan ideas such as musical professionalism, modernist reformism, and cultural preservationism. Thomas Turino illustrates how these ideas were reinforced and became more widely spread in Zimbabwe through cosmopolitan networks and the social power and technologies of the individuals involved reinforced. Because the federation was a political experiment at racial harmony in a racially troubled region, Turino shows how various cultural attitudes and projects got started under the banner of what Patrick Keatley termed "the politics of partnership." Turino also traces the rise of early African dance bands, concert performance ensembles, and other musical activities such as ballroom dancing, which he says were associated largely with middle-class performers, audiences, and occasions. Since the majority of the African political elite come from the ranks of the middle-class, he argues, "an understanding of this group's cultural practice and attitudes is key to comprehending musical nationalism [. . .] as well as popular music trends more generally" (119).

In the later part of the book, Turino discusses the cultural and ideological positions of the nationalist leadership and the ways cultural and musical nationalism were developed and used to further the goals of the political movement during the struggle for independence. He argues that early cultural nationalism in Zimbabwean music helped foster and diffuse a new aesthetic preference for syncretic artistic and cultural styles. In chapter six he introduces an interesting discussion of the distinction between musical nationalism and political nationalist movement, and he defines the former as the conscious use of music in the service of the latter. He focuses on Chimurenga songs, or "songs of the struggle," as an explicit form of musical nationalism during the liberation war in Zimbabwe. In the last two chapters of the book, Turino discusses the capitalist-cosmopolitan context where modernist values emphasize new composition and originality as criteria for artistic standing, as opposed to the more collective rural orientation.

One of the most interesting points that Turino makes in his book is that "to understand the impact of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Shona music it is...