African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe

Mhoze Chikowero

Description

Winner, 2016 SEM Kwabena Nketia Book Prize

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Encounters: Song, Power and Being
1. Missionary Witchcrafting African Being: Cultural Disarmament
2. Purging the "Heathen" Song, Mis/Grafting the Missionary Hymn
3. "Too Many Don'ts:" Reinforcing, Disrupting the Criminalization of African Musical Cultures
4. Architectures of Control: African Urban Re/Creation
5. The "Tribal Dance" as a Colonial Alibi: Ethnomusicology and the Tribalization of African Being
6. Chimanjemanje: Performing and Contesting Colonial Modernity
7. The Many Moods of "Skokiaan:" Criminalized Leisure, Underclass Defiance and Self-Narration
8. Usable Pasts: Crafting Madzimbabwe Through Memory, Tradition, Song
9. Cultures of Resistance: Genealogies of Chimurenga Song
10. Jane Lungile Ngwenya: A Transgenerational Conversation
Epilogue: Postcolonial Legacies: Song, Power and Knowledge Production
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Ethnomusicology
• History of classical music traditions
• Multiple signal classification
• African Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 24 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 11
• EAN13: 9780253018090
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

AFRICAN MUSIC, POWER, AND BEING IN COLONIAL ZIMBABWE
AFRICAN EXPRESSIVE CULTURES
Patrick McNaughton, editor
Associate editors
Catherine M. Cole ~ Barbara G. Hoffman ~ Eileen Julien
Kassim Kon ~ D. A. Masolo ~ Elisha Renne ~ Zo Strother

Ethnomusicology Multimedia (EM) is a collaborative publishing program, developed with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to identify and publish first books in ethnomusicology, accompanied by supplemental audiovisual materials online at www.ethnomultimedia.org .
A collaboration of the presses at Indiana and Temple universities, EM is an innovative, entrepreneurial, and cooperative effort to expand publishing opportunities for emerging scholars in ethnomusicology and to increase audience reach by using common resources available to the presses through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Each press acquires and develops EM books according to its own profile and editorial criteria.
EM s most innovative features are its web-based components, which include a password-protected Annotation Management System (AMS) where authors can upload peer-reviewed audio, video, and static image content for editing and annotation and key the selections to corresponding references in their texts; a public site for viewing the web content, www.ethnomultimedia.org , with links to publishers websites for information about the accompanying books; and the Avalon Media System, which hosts video and audio content for the website. The AMS and website were designed and built by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities at Indiana University. Avalon was designed and built by the libraries at Indiana University and Northwestern University with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The Indiana University Libraries hosts the website and the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) provides archiving and preservation services for the EM online content.
AFRICAN MUSIC, POWER, AND BEING IN COLONIAL ZIMBABWE
Mhoze Chikowero
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Mhoze Chikowero
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chikowero, Mhoze, [date] author.
African music, power, and being in colonial Zimbabwe / Mhoze Chikowero.
pages cm. - (African expressive cultures) (Ethnomusicology multimedia)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01768-0 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01803-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01809-0 (ebook) 1. Popular music-Social aspects-Zimbabwe-History-20th century. 2. Popular music-Political aspects-Zimbabwe-History-20th century. 3. Missions-Zimbabwe. 4. Zimbabwe-Social conditions- 20th century. 5. Zimbabwe-Colonial influence. I. Title. II. Series: African expressive cultures. III. Series: Ethnomusicology multimedia.
ML3917.Z55C55 2015
780.96891-dc23
2015017453
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
Amai Florence Chikowero, greatest educator, singer of hymns most beautiful and mysterious. You taught us the power of school, and the power of song. Mudhara Mugoni Chikowero, you of the Chiwashira Brothers Choir. Dova renyu iro! And to all your descendants .
Contents
Kupa Kutenda / Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cross-Cultural Encounters: Song, Power, and Being
1 Missionary Witchcrafting African Being: Cultural Disarmament
2 Purging the Heathen Song, Mis/Grafting the Missionary Hymn
3 Too Many Don ts : Reinforcing, Disrupting the Criminalization of African Musical Cultures
4 Architectures of Control: African Urban Re/Creation
5 The Tribal Dance as a Colonial Alibi: Ethnomusicology and the Tribalization of African Being
6 Chimanjemanje: Performing and Contesting Colonial Modernity
7 The Many Moods of Skokiaan : Criminalized Leisure, Underclass Defiance, and Self-Narration
8 Usable Pasts: Crafting Madzimbabwe through Memory, Tradition, Song
9 Cultures of Resistance: Genealogies of Chimurenga Song
10 Jane Lungile Ngwenya: A Transgenerational Conversation
Epilogue: Postcolonial Legacies: Song, Power, and Knowledge Production
Notes
Selected Bibliography and Discography
Index
Kupa Kutenda / Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK EMERGES out of a life, an upbringing, conversations, and study in the school of the Madzimbabwe everyday and the school that came. It is there that it will be celebrated or ridiculed-at the various matare where I grew up singing, listening to songs and stories, and marveling at the magical footwork of Chapter, the village dancing professor paChikunguru paya, at Growth Points like Murambinda, in the urban dis/locations of Mbare, Makokoba, Esigodini, and Yeoville down in Joburg. The 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?). In these spaces I listened, thought, learned, and spoke with those driven by the spirit of song; ate gochi-gochi washed down with the ritual Lion lager to feel at home; or just watched the city that refuses to sleep. The stories and sensibilities of Madzimbabwe song and recreational cultures are cultivated at such places as the not-so-polite Pamuzinda, where makoronyera-those dislocated urban hunters-can crudely push you around, accusing you of robbing them as a ruse to rob you; at Sports Diner, where the more artistic of these klevas dance sideways to liberate wallets and cell phones from the naive and the distracted who dutifully raise the flag with both hands to superstar Karikoga Zhakata chanting, Uri gamba wani iwe simudza mureza! They are unpatriotic like that, those makoronyera.
The central figures in these pages are the artists, many of whom have become friends over the years. Thanks for being there always, Comrade Chinx and Mai Lenny, Bill Saidi, Mhofu Zexie, Green and Stella Manatsa, Friday Mbirimi, the late Professor Kenneth and Lina Mattaka, Kembo Ncube, and the numerous names catalogued in these pages. This book would have turned out very differently without Mudhara Abel Sithole s indefatigable energy, leading hand, and knowledge of where things were trying to go all those years. Gogo Jane Lungile Ngwenya, the greatest historian, teacher, and grandmother. Dhara guru, Mukanya Thomas Tafirenyika Mapfumo and Mukoma Lance, William, and Itai, thanks for the hospitality in Eugene, for sharing the stories of your lives and those majestic photos! The same goes to Austin Sibanda, the Blacks Unlimited Band Manager. Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press believed in this book beyond ephemeral impediments. Thanks also for covering those production costs. My gratitude to the entire editorial team, especially to Shoshanna Green for the eagle eye! A version of chapter 6 was previously published in Music, Performance, and African Identities; my thanks to Rochester University Press and the editors, Toyin Falola and Tyler Fleming.
A hangry mind was cultivated at the University of Zimbabwe, and the bounty farmers include the Economic History faculty, V. E. M. Machingaidze, J. P. Mtisi, and Pius Nyambara, and my colleagues in that record-setting honors class of 2001. Professor Ezra Chitando s hand encouraged research from the early seasons, and Josephine Nhongo-Simbanegavi not only taught me but, like the mother that she is, also ululated at the rituals of honor both in Harare and in Halifax! Jerry Mazarire, let s play more Pengaudzoke for the next book, but for now, sando dzako for opening the door for me to study history after weeks of wandering between entirely useless courses when I entered the UZ in 1999.
In 2003, I carried my archives across the Atlantic to work with Gary Kynoch, together with Phil Zachernuk and Jane Parpart at Dalhousie University. To Guy Thompson, thanks for the deep interest. Generous Killam Scholarships and History Department and Faculty of Graduate Studies fellowships underwrote the years of single-minded studying in Halifax before I skipped south to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis in New Jersey in 2008. Julie Livingstone made that fellowship profitable with the weekly Vernacular Epistemologies seminars and ample space to think and write.
Unlike building a house, writing a book means rewriting. And thankfully, this book did not go the way of Tizira s proverbial basket that gets weaved at one end while it unweaves at the other; support for those crucial and self-indulgent processes of writing and rewriting came in generous leave time and pockets of funding from my employers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who granted me an IHC time-release fellowship and two UCSB Junior Faculty Research Awards, in addition to liberal sums in start-up research money, from 2009. A very generous Hellman Family Faculty Research Fellowship enabled me to sustain long-term research in Zimbabwe and Joni.
Colleagues at UCSB, including Stephan Miescher, Peter Bloom, and Sylvester Ogbechie, read versions of either the whole book or individual chapters, as did a small circle of fellow junior faculty book-writi