African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (African Expressive Cultures)

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. Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Cross-Cultural Encounters: Song, Power, and Being 18 1 Missionary Witchcrafting African Being: Cultural Disarmament 36 2 Purging the “Heathen” Song, Mis/Grafting the Missionary Hymn 73 3 “Too Many Don’ts”: Reinforcing, Disrupting the Criminalization of African Musical Cultures 97 4 Architectures of Control: African Urban Re/Creation 129 5 The “Tribal Dance” as a Colonial Alibi: Ethnomusicology and the Tribalization of African Being 148 6 Chimanjemanje: Performing and Contesting Colonial Modernity 171 7 The Many Moods of “Skokiaan”: Criminalized Leisure, Underclass Defiance, and Self-Narration 204 8 Usable Pasts: Crafting Madzimbabwe through Memory, Tradition, Song 230 9 Cultures of Resistance: Genealogies of Chimurenga Song 256 10 Jane Lungile Ngwenya: A Transgenerational Conversation 291 Epilogue: Postcolonial Legacies: Song, Power, and Knowledge Production 310 Notes 322 Selected Bibliography and Discography 328 Index 344 A 344 B 344 C 345 D 347 E 348 F 348 G 349 H 349 I 350 J 350 K 350 L 351 M 351 N 355 O 357 P 357 R 357 S 358 T 360 U 361 V 361 W 362 X 362 Y 362 Z 362 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. -- Amazon.com In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero reads African sources to interrogate and utilize the confessional colonial archive to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and 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 guitarists 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.