African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe
African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe

Author: Mhoze Chikowero

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-11-24

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0253018099

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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.

Lion Songs
Lion Songs

Author: Banning Eyre

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2015-05-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0822375427

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Like Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, singer, composer, and bandleader Thomas Mapfumo and his music came to represent his native country's anticolonial struggle and cultural identity. Mapfumo was born in 1945 in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The trajectory of his career—from early performances of rock 'n' roll tunes to later creating a new genre based on traditional Zimbabwean music, including the sacred mbira, and African and Western pop—is a metaphor for Zimbabwe's evolution from colony to independent nation. Lion Songs is an authoritative biography of Mapfumo that narrates the life and career of this creative, complex, and iconic figure. Banning Eyre ties the arc of Mapfumo's career to the history of Zimbabwe. The genre Mapfumo created in the 1970s called chimurenga, or "struggle" music, challenged the Rhodesian government—which banned his music and jailed him—and became important to Zimbabwe achieving independence in 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s Mapfumo's international profile grew along with his opposition to Robert Mugabe's dictatorship. Mugabe had been a hero of the revolution, but Mapfumo’s criticism of his regime led authorities and loyalists to turn on the singer with threats and intimidation. Beginning in 2000, Mapfumo and key band and family members left Zimbabwe. Many of them, including Mapfumo, now reside in Eugene, Oregon. A labor of love, Lion Songs is the product of a twenty-five-year friendship and professional relationship between Eyre and Mapfumo that demonstrates Mapfumo's musical and political importance to his nation, its freedom struggle, and its culture.

Sound Fragments
Sound Fragments

Author: Noel Lobley

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2022-04-19

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0819580783

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Winner of IASPM Book Prize, given by IASPM, 2023 This book is an ethnographic study of sound archives and the processes of creative decolonization that form alternative modes of archiving and curating in the 21st century. It explores the histories and afterlives of sound collections and practices at the International Library of African Music. Sound Fragments follows what happens when a colonial sound archive is repurposed and reimagined by local artists in post-apartheid South Africa. The narrative speaks to larger issues in sound studies, curatorial practices, and the reciprocity and ethics of listening to and reclaiming culture. Sound Fragments interrogates how Xhosa arts activism contributes to an expanding notion of what a sound or cultural archive could be, and where it may resonate now and in future.

Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe
Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe

Author: Luis Gimenez Amoros

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-06

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0429012578

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Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe analyses the revitalisation and repatriation of historical recordings from the largest sound archive in Africa, the International Library of African Music (ILAM). It provides a postcolonial study on the African sound archive divided into three historical periods: the colonial period offers a critical analysis on how ILAM classifies its music through ethnic and linguistic groups; the postcolonial period reconsiders postcolonial nationhood, new/old mobility and cultural border crossing in present Africa; and the recent period of repatriation focuses on the author’s revitalisation of the sound archive. The main goal of this study is to reconsider the colonial demarcations of southern African mbira music provided by the International Library of African Music (ILAM). These mbira recordings reveal that the harmonic system used in different lamellophones (or mbiras) in southern Africa is musically related. The analysis of sound archives in Africa is an essential tool to envision the new ways in which African culture can be directed not only from postcolonial notions of nationhood or Afrocentric discourses but also for the necessity of bringing awareness of the circulation of musical cultures from and beyond colonial African borders.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History
The Palgrave Handbook of African Colonial and Postcolonial History

Author: Martin S. Shanguhyia

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-28

Total Pages: 1360

ISBN-13: 1137594268

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This wide-ranging volume presents the most complete appraisal of modern African history to date. It assembles dozens of new and established scholars to tackle the questions and subjects that define the field, ranging from the economy, the two world wars, nationalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics to religion, development, sexuality, and the African youth experience. Contributors are drawn from numerous fields in African studies, including art, music, literature, education, and anthropology. The themes they cover illustrate the depth of modern African history and the diversity and originality of lenses available for examining it. Older themes in the field have been treated to an engaging re-assessment, while new and emerging themes are situated as the book’s core strength. The result is a comprehensive, vital picture of where the field of modern African history stands today.

On African Music
On African Music

Author: Kofi Agawu

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-05-19

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0197664091

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Written by one of the best-known academic writers on African music, On African Music is a collection of seven essays addressing various techniques, influences, and scholarly approaches to African music. After a concise introduction spelling out the rationale for the book, successive chapters develop answers to questions such as: How does a "minimalist impulse" animate creativity in Africa, and does "Western minimalism" differ from "African minimalism"? How do we explain the prevalence of iconic effects in African expressive forms? How has (European) tonality functioned as a "colonizing force" in African music? Why is the (written) art music of the continent talked about so little when it has been in existence since the middle of the nineteenth century? How might the discipline of music theory be rejuvenated by "aid" from Africa? What are the strengths and limitations of ethnotheory as a methodology? Who is who in theorizations of African rhythm, and how might we explain the shape of the existing archive? This book thus deals with analytical and interpretive issues, the politics of scholarship, and salient features of African music. Laced with provocative viewpoints on each page, On African Music should appeal not only to readers curious about the structural underpinnings of African music but also to those who wish to reflect critically and philosophically on how we study and write about the music of the continent, how we might approach its global status with a firm understanding from the inside, and what our priorities might be in promoting an empowering cosmopolitan discourse.

African Traditional Religion Encounters Christianity
African Traditional Religion Encounters Christianity

Author: John Chitakure

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 149824419X

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Right from the beginning of humankind, God has never deprived a people of his grace and revelation. In fact, God uses people's environment and culture to communicate his will. There is no single religion that can claim to have the exclusive possession of God's revelation, for God is too immense to be confined within one faith. Hence, it was erroneous, blasphemous, and misleading for some of the early Christian missionaries to Africa to claim that they had brought God to Africa, a mentality that implied the non-existence of God in Africa before their arrival. Of course, God was already in Africa, but the missionaries either failed to discern his presence or just disregarded the traces of his existence. This book explores the religious beliefs, practices, and values of the indigenous people of Africa at the time of the early missionaries' arrival, with particular reference to the Shona people of Zimbabwe. It also evaluates the extent of the missionarie's successes and challenges in converting Africans to Christianity. It finally surveys how African Christians have remained attached to the indigenous religious beliefs that used to provide answers to their existential questions.

Regional History as Cultural Identity
Regional History as Cultural Identity

Author: Kenneth J. Bindas

Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice

Published: 2017-10-13T00:00:00+02:00

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 8867289349

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This book brings together scholars to reflect upon the significance and meaning of local and regional history, focusing on how these histories impact people’s cultural identity through traditions, culture, language, and politics. Scholars from all over the world analyze the process of communal identity construction ‒ the feeling of belonging to one state or nation regardless of one’s legal citizenship status ‒ by focusing on case studies from North America, South America, Africa, and Europe. By analyzing the cultural and social aspects of community formation through language, religion, symbols, politics, race, and blood ties, these papers reveal that national identity, rather than being an inborn trait, is more often a result of the presence of common elements in the daily lives of individuals.

The Zimdancehall Revolution
The Zimdancehall Revolution

Author: Tanaka Chidora

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-12-09

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 3031418549

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Zimdancehall is a musical movement in Zimbabwe that has grown significantly since 2010. The Zimdancehall Revolution brings together critical essays on various aspects of Zimdancehall culture by scholars from diverse disciplines. Traditionally, music critics and senior academics have not taken Zimdancehall seriously, regarding it as vulgar, transient, bubble gum, lacking depth, and in short, a fad. There were also allegations that the lyrics influenced factionalism, incited violence and glorified drug use and unbridled promiscuity among the youth. This book affords this movement the protracted intellectual engagement that it deserves and argues that Zimdancehall is more than just a musical genre but an everyday culture, a way of life. The genre’s close association with the ghetto is telling and enables critics to look at it as a social movement, a revolution, or a raw, petulant and raging disturbance of peace by those who live their lives on the margins. It is, thus, a violent irruption onto the public space by marginalised young people whose presence as artistes creating art from the margins, simultaneously as victims and agents, circulating in a geography that escapes the limits of nationalist ideological and physical territory, in a way subverts communitarian prescriptions and allows young people entry into the world, albeit in a painful, tumultuous and violent way. The essays range from the mapping of the genre’s historical development to theoretical interventions in understanding the genre and its relationship with various aspects of the Zimbabwean society like politics, gender, religion, language, dance, cultural values and other genres.

Modernization as Spectacle in Africa
Modernization as Spectacle in Africa

Author: Peter J. Bloom

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0253012333

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For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans' perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.