Thomas Mapfumo, Mbira Masters and Rhodesian Gatekeepers

Zimbabwe’s mbira sound is spiritual tender in world music. The mbira, perhaps the Southern African country’s flagship culture export, is a defining influence on the country’s hit parade, spiritual landscape and social memory.

Zimbabwean musicians who have made international headway, particularly Oliver Mtukudzi, Thomas Mapfumo, Chiwoniso Maraire, Bhundu Boys and Four Brothers, have ridden on the mbira sound, live or reimagined in jit riff. Lately, biographers, historians and journalists have been building a rich ethnomusicology trove from the country’s foremost mbira repertoire mpfumo, the Chimurenga artist whose music became the default soundtrack of the liberation struggle, spearheaded a mbira renaissance, and chanted down barriers to equality in both Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, is a recurring interest in these books.

On November 11, 2016, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) gave a nod to these efforts by jointly awarding the Kwabena Nketia Book Prize for 2016 to Mhoze Chikowero for African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (Indiana University Press, 2015) and Banning Eyre for Lion Songs: Thomas Mapfumo and the Songs that Made Zimbabwe (Duke University Press, 2015).

Announcing the prizes at the annual SEM meeting in Washington DC, ethnomusicologist Jean Kidula noted that both books are “compelling historical works on the working of music in Zimbabwe’s contemporary national and social politics.”

The panel’s choices for the best ethnomusicology titles not only converges on the subject of Zimbabwean music. Both books were conceived outside the discipline of ethnomusicology. Chikowero is a historian and Eyre is a biographer.

The writers, who have previously collaborated course around their vast spans of research with freewheeling lyrical facility and a confessional attachment to the world of the Shona.

Kidula said Eyre’s book cast the spell of an unputdownable novel on his crew. “Banning’s writing is engaging and poetic, carefully utilizing storytelling, biographies, and detailed descriptions as well as analyses of sonic and extrasonic elements.”

Although Mbira Month was a low-key affair, barely mentioned outside official arrangements, with citizens carried along by new waves of urban culture, what Zimbabweans cannot do in September, Chikowero and Eyre with their bubbly and riotous books on Zimbabwean music.

Chikowero, an African history professor in the U.S, puts out in African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe an endearing homage to indigenous music and ethnomusicological, if inadvertently, masterstroke.

He rewinds an aural archive spanning over seven decades, from British colonisation to the liberation struggle, to show the mbira’s domain-straddling cultural influence.
Zimbabwe’s social memory can be unwound, mood for mood, from the spool of her music dynasties.

Mbira poetics in the moonshine, mid-century township culture, chimurenga renaissance, gospel, jit, sungura and dancehall are all genealogies of the Zimbabwean spirit. Today, the mbira may assure the country a proud category in world music but to get there, it had to survive repression by Rhodesian gatekeepers.

In telling the story of Rhodesian’s sustained assault on indigenous ways of being, Chikowero drags missionaries into the dock for doubling up as the colonial state’s incestuous liaisons.

Missionaries are as much part of the narrative as musicians. But Chikowero shreds their collars, taking issue not only with their complicity with but their participation in Rhodesia’s extractive regime.

Besides driving out every relic of indigenous culture, including traditional music, missionaries administered taxes, destocking, forced labour and issued out edicts for church and state.

Chikowero’s exhaustive scholarship, feverish passion for music, confessional reading of indigenous belief systems and free-spirited verbal facility bring about an at once incisive and involved ethnomusicological project.

The author traverses Harare’s nightlife and unwinds the spool of great Zimbabwean traditions to capture the spiritual and cultural strivings of a longsuffering people.

Crucially, music in Chikowero’s book is not just a vastly diverting affair but a programme of social change and, inseparably, the alphabet of the human spirit.

Chikowero deploys his mastery of history and intimate knowledge of Zimbabwean music for a memorable feat in ethnomusicology.

Set between the origins of Rhodesia and the children of tribulation’s final birth pangs for Zimbabwe, the book is as much about the music as it is about the nation.

While a lot of colonial hindsight is not at home in territories beyond simple truths, Chikowero ventures into the covert layers of cultural imperialism.

His erudite, if insistently editorialised, history of Zimbabwean music attacks settler iconoclasm, Rhodesian incest between church and state, and the bastardisation of the African and his history.

Chikowero interprets the missionary conquest against indigenous culture, including music and dance, not only as sacrilege but deliberate erasure of African ways of being, supplanting them with a Euro-themed centre.

Mbirapocalypse, the conspired demise of the Shona thumb piano, was a bastard policy of Rhodesian incest between church and state.

The state sought to repress Shona spirituality, of which mbira, horn, drum and drum, were connectivity devices, because the First Chimurenga (1896 Shona-Ndebele) had been waged under the charismatic leadership of spirit mediums invoking God against their colonisers.

Its iconoclastic project, designed to sweep away every last cultural residue of the uprising, found willing agents in the mainline Christian denominations whose mission had been also impeded by the indigenous belief system.

Missionaries come across in African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe as colonial proxies, demonising everything black and fetishising everything white, effectively distorting the gospel into a subtext of European imperialism.

Traditional instruments become a target of Rhodesian iconoclasm because of their expansive stake in the indigenous spiritual regimen.

In the vastly diverting natural scenery of Mashonaland, racist missionaries saw the African as the only defect to be regretted. He had to be tamed, a task that partly meant destroying every relic of his culture and appropriating him for Rhodesia’s extractive economy.

The enforcement of conscience in Rhodesia is an enduring subject of interest. Some feel that Christianity is a beneficiary of colonial privileges which ought to be revoked.

I feel that missionary atrocities are not so much in the Christianisation of the African but in the Europeanisation of Christianity for the dehumanisation of the African.

That, in a free Zimbabwean dispensation, mapping religion in terms of geographic assumptions and enforcing conscience would be in itself a relapse to dark Rhodesia.

The bad vibrations were not in Africans singing “Amazing Grace,” so far as the mode was spiritual rather than statutory, but in Africans belting out “Rule, Britannia, Rule” in either mode.

Chikowero’s implied juxtaposition of polar extremes, the truth claims of the indigenous belief system on one hand and missionary atrocities on the other hand, inadvertently primes the reader to judge the essence of “the African High God” against a misrepresentation of “the Christian God.”

Musicians within the Christian tradition today regard these supposedly regional deities as one omnipresent entity and, in defiance of racist missionaries, invoke Him with the instruments closer to their hearts, including mbira, hosho, hwamanda and ngomarungundu.

This transition is the subject of Chikowero’s second chapter. Having failed to move African souls with transliterated hymns, the missionaries set about “refixing” Christian songs to indigenous folk tunes.

Noted mbira exponent, the late Dumi Maraire, and others lent their hands to this project but the breakout success belonged to the Vabvuwi and Ruwadzano guilds of the Methodist church whose spontaneous African praises were readily appropriated by the African independent churches.

The African independent church and its latter-day counterpart, the charismatic mega-church, provide a nationalist counter-script to the erroneous assumption of Christianity as inexorably European.

The latter church’s emphasis on faith as a question of individual conviction rather than social convention, successfully deviating from the mainline method, also challenge the assumption that Christian is a residue of colonial privilege.

Zimbabwe’s foremost gospel artist Charles Charamba shares Chikowero’s denunciation of the missionary crusade against traditional instruments and has mastered the indigenous sound even as he questions ancestral worship, and affirms the divinity and universality of Jesus.

His South African counterpart Solly Mahlangu addresses both the white missionary and black sceptical in an Afro-themed chorus: “When Jesus came, He came down from heaven; when He landed, He landed in Israel; when there was trouble, He came down to Africa; so we must praise Him, praise Him in an African way.”

Mid-century subcultures starring Dorothy Masuka August Musarurwa and others were borne out of urban dislocation hence the convergence of music, sex, gang culture and the potent, backyard brew.

A whole chapter is dedicated to Musarurwa’s phenomenal jazz instrumental, “Skokiian,” which ran into a hundred covers drew homage from major artists such as Louis Armstrong.

Chikowero bemoans imperialist blatant “othering” in that Musarurwa’s instrumental became the blank slate for exotic fantasies about Africa by foreign artists.

A Florida couple cashed in on the inspiration of these covers, enacting “Africa in miniature” with an unpartitioned zoo where animals coexisted with black people.

On the cultural front, the crowning accomplishment in Zimbabwe’s political awakening was the upsurge of Chimurenga music in the 1960s.

Thomas Mapfumo’s Hallelujah Chicken Run Band transposed the majestic mbira in guitar riffs and turned the Harare hit parade on its head.

The revolt, outgrowing Western covers for an indigenous feel, was as instrumental as it was lyrical. Mapfumo had occasional brushes with the censors and the police for daring Ian Smith in songs such as “Tumira Vana Kuhondo.”

Zexie Manatsa’s Green Arrows, banjo-strumming prodigies from Mhangura, became a national sensation with politically charged tracks like “Nyoka yeNdara,”“Mwana Waenda” and “Hangaiwa.”

Chikowero interrogates the political economy of performance in Zimbabwe with a mastery of detail that is yet to be matched.

Free-spirited verbal crawl like “perfomative madariro” and “digital matare” make this long-run affair an incredibly breezy read.

Politics and spirituality in music also run the thread of Eyre’s Lion Songs. The biography was an easy pick for an ethnomusicology award thanks to its immersion in the subject.

Casting aside the faintest semblance of professional distance, Eyre shares marijuana and performs with Thomas Mapfumo’s Blacks Unlimited, even borrowing the latter’s Murehwa totem as his stage name, over an endearing friendship of 25 years.

Zimbabwe’s music connoisseur Fred Zindi, veteran journalist Geoff Nyarota, literary notables Chenjerai Hove and Alexander Kanengoni, promoters and Blacks Unlimited guitarists Jonah Sithole, Joshua Dube and other sources reveal the many faces of Mapfumo.

Branching out of an artistic family tree, including Marshall, Munhumumwe, the jit thoroughbred and Four Brothers frontman; Bernard Chidzero, the novelist and finance minister infamous for ushering in structural adjustment; and literary notable Musaemura Zimunya, Mapfumo’s profile in Zimbabwe’s showbiz circuit merited him the title Lion of Zimbabwe.

Mapfumo’s foremost revolution in Zimbabwean music is not only his wartime lyrical confrontation of Rhodesia and post-colonial abuses but, crucially, his resuscitation of the mbira mix.

His militant repertoire merits the name Chimurenga music on both scores.
Chikowero and Eyre’s books intersect in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s when Mapfumo and contemporaries, notably Zimbabwe’s superstar Oliver Mtukudzi and yesteryear icon Manatsa, locate semiotic resonance for the war effort in repressed canon of the children of tribulation.

But none of the artists cutting away from the Western covers popular at the time to appropriate the Shona canon for the condition go further than Mapfumo, not least because he is the first to capture the spiritually charged mbira sound into a revolution-themed set.

“NgomaYarira,” composed during Mapfumo’s colourful stint with Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, initiates the meeting of mbira and guitar, where the mbira sound is transposed in guitar riffs, facilitating its appearance on the arena of popular culture decades after its suppression by Rhodesian administrators and their clerical instruments.

The Lion of Zimbabwe, then a war-like cub, keeps up with the decolonisation effort “Pfumvu Paruzevha,”“Pamuromo Chete,” and “Vana Kuhondo,” while Zexie Manatsa is not far behind with “Nyoka Yendara,”“Hangaiwa” and “Tipeiwo Ndege.”
Both ride on metaphors that may lend themselves to ambiguity to evade censorship but the defiance is not lost on the children of tribulation and Mapfumo’s mbira soundtrack is a protest apart.

However, Mapfumo only takes up the mbira itself well into Independence after the umpteenth fallout with legendary guitarist Jonah Sithole who had, for years, commandeered the guitar into a mbira medium.

Mapfumo is currently in self-imposed exile in the U.S. Eyre believes that the Lion of Zimbabwe was “certainly compromised, if not ruined by his move to America.”
It was a bad business decision may have cut him off the everyday strivings of his people which inspired timeless offerings like “Varombo Kuvarombo,” “Corruption,” “Chipatapata” and “Vanhu Vatema.”

Whatever the case, he has been less inspired lately.

Although he is still recording, he is a figure but no longer a force on Zimbabwe’s hit parade. New artists, including Zimbabwe’s foremost young artist Jah Prayzah, will sustain his mbira experiment, though none has stepped into his political mantle as yet.

Eyre picks up Lion Songs around the place Chikowero finishes African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe but the magnitude of Chimurenga experiment which is his keynote narrative can only be fully appreciated in light of Chikowero’s book.

Although written apart, the books are mutually code-breaking in the manner doomsday preppers find Daniel and Revelation cross-pollinated.

There are few other recent books on Zimbabwean music but Lion Songs and African Music are a league apart both for rigour and fervour.

Tuku Backstage, should have been a preferred reference, given the Mtukudzi’s stature but can be put down to an extended tabloid, a middling take given to undermining rather than understanding the artist.