Zimbabwe’s Powerful Music of

Struggle
By Anakwa Dwamena

March 20, 2018

In April of 1980, when Bob Marley arrived to headline the independence

celebrations that would see Rhodesia become Zimbabwe, his song
“Zimbabwe,” the centerpiece of the “Survival” album, was the most
popular foreign song in the country. Marley, whose religion of
Rastafarianism had long preached cultural and political resistance
against white oppression in Africa, wanted to “build a blood-claat studio
inna Africa, have hit after blood-claat hit”—so much so that he spent
thousands of dollars flying lighting and sound equipment to Zimbabwe
to create a concert atmosphere that would match that of Madison Square
Garden.
In Zimbabwe, popular songs were central to the century-long fight to
end the colonial system, and Marley’s claim that music was “the biggest
gun because the oppressed cannot afford weapons” was nowhere more
resonant. After Marley’s performance that night, when he shed tears
watching the Rhodesian flag come down and Zimbabwe’s go up, the
local musician Thomas Mapfumo took the stage. Mapfumo was a
leading singer of chimurenga music, the music of struggle. Never mind
that it was late, and that Prince Charles and all the other foreign
dignitaries and top-ranking army officers—the nation’s new V.I.P.s—
had left. The freedom fighters stayed behind, waving their guns.
Peasants who had been locked out of the main event joined in dancing to
the chimurenga music until the next morning.

I spoke with Professor Mickias Musiyiwa, of the University of

Zimbabwe, who told me that chimurenga music continues to be “one
platform that Zimbabweans always resort to whenever they want to
express their grievances against their leaders and against Western
imperialism.” The word comes from the name of Murenga, an early
ancestor and warrior of the Shona people. In Zimbabwe’s liberation war,
of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the military wings of guerrillas
based in Mozambique and Zambia set up choirs to
sing chimurenga songs that derived from folk hymns and other folk
songs. These hymns connected the living with the world of the ancestors
and recorded the struggle for those to come. Revolutionaries played
these songs at rallies held in urban areas and at all-night vigils
called mapungwes, where guerrillas and peasants would come together
to sing.

Songs like “Muka, Muka!” (“Wake Up, Wake Up!”) and “Tumira Vana
Kuhondo” (“Mothers Send Your Children to War”) were sung to
politicize and educate Zimbabweans about why the war for
independence was being fought. “The song became the classroom, so to
speak, just like in South Africa and in Kenya, through which people
could access information of what was happening in different parts of the
country,” Maurice Vambe, a professor of African literature at the
University of South Africa, explained to me. The songs could also
correct a historical narrative. Songs such as “Vakawuya Zimbabwe”
(“They Came to Zimbabwe”) narrated the exploitation of Zimbabwe and
sought to revive old stories about pre-colonial times. Much like reggae
would seek to do, the music was making contemporary social
commentary and preserving ancient cultural memory.

Although Thomas Mapfumo was not among the guerrillas in

Mozambique and Zambia, his music championed the war for
independence, leading to his detention and multiple arrests. His
popularity as the leading chimurenga musician was fuelled by his band’s
adaption of the mbira, a thumb piano that is central to Shona spiritual
communication. By using a traditional instrument—particularly one with
ties to ancestor worship—Mapfumo was signalling his participation in
acultural revolution against colonial rule.
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In the first half-decade after Zimbabwe won its independence,

Mapfumo, like other chimurenga musicians, would sing songs like
“Mabasa” (“Let’s Get Back to Work”), about the need for unity in order
to build the new nation. But, as the eighties turned to the nineties, the
tone of his music changed. In 1988, his song “Corruption” brought to the
national airwaves the whispered frustrations heard in private offices,
marketplaces, and homes about the unequal distribution of the nation’s
wealth. The outcry wasn’t, as we might assume, for the former President
Robert Mugabe and other leaders to step aside. “People were not really
thinking about issues of succession,” Musiyiwa explained. Most citizens,
having recently made personal sacrifices for the new nation, were
instead demanding a redirection. “People now were beginning to say this
is not what we fought for,” Musiyiwa said. “They lost their lives in order
to build a society in which everyone benefits. In which services are
provided.”

Mapfumo, who is now seventy-two, will return to his country later this
month after ten years of self-imposed exile, in Oregon, as a persona non
grata of the Mugabe regime. He once explained that “independence in
Zimbabwe brought much-needed freedom but triggered other
unexpected tribulations.” Chimurenga, he wrote, has shifted to focus on
the “elimination of public office corruption while advocating for the
citizen’s pursuit of peace, happiness, equality, dignity, comfort and the
rule of law.” Music as a weapon in the hands of the people has been
turned against the old revolutionaries. Mapfumo’s “Maiti Kurima
Hamubvire” (“You Used to Say You Are Good Farmers”), to take one
example, touches on the failure of the national government to make land
reform work and lists its other broken promises. But the ruling class was
not blind to the power of chimurenga. To counter the popular music, the
government started holding galas during national holidays, in the early
aughts. The goal, as a former minister of information and publicity told
the state-owned daily newspaper the Herald, was for “a new form of
Press statement” that “whipped people into common liberation thinking
and kept them informed, educated and united.”

On Tuesday, November 21, 2017, when Robert Mugabe resigned from

his position as President, onlookers on the streets of Harare cheered on a
solitary young man in a red bucket hat, who played a song called
“Kutonga Kwaro” on a trombone. Although the song was released just a
week before the protests had started, it had been adopted as the
unofficial anthem of the uprising. In the marches that saw the fall of
Mugabe, and at the inauguration of his former Vice-President Emmerson
Mnangagwa, “Kutonga Kwaro” was blaring from thousands of cars in
the streets and on radios everywhere. The song talks about the coming of
a familiar but long-awaited hero, a fearsome character before whom
other men cringe, one who will change the rules, open the granary.
But is ‘Kutonga Kwaro’ true chimurenga music? The song was written
by Jah Prayzah, who has spent most of his career as a brand ambassador
of the Zimbabwe Defense Forces (Z.D.F.). Accordingly, the lyrics of his
music extoll the military strongman, and he styles himself in military
fatigues and apparel. It has been dangerous in the last decade to sing or
produce chimurenga music that criticizes the state; Mapfumo and his
family faced physical threats before fleeing the country. Prayzah’s music
embodies the paradox of Zimbabwe’s revolution. The military affiliation
has protected his right to free speech, to sing for a new day, but such
protection is only necessary because of the rigid and censored society
that the military has created.

Zimbabweans have had mixed reactions to the military’s involvement in

the removal of Mugabe and the precedent that it sets. One prominent
Zimbabwean blogger, who was derided for taking a picture with a
soldier while standing next to an army tank, wrote about how big a deal
it was to feel safe for once around the soldiers. Zimbabweans have been
told for decades that they owe their liberation to these soldiers and the
military, but the military had yet to show any concern for the will of the
people until now. Mapfumo’s anti-Mugabe song “Masoja Nemapurisa”
(“Father, If Soldiers and Police Refuse to Beat People, What Will You
Do?”) feels prophetic. But, with the leadership connected to Mugabe
still in charge, he concedes, “It’s still the old train that we’re riding but
they’ve got a different driver.” Soldiers seizing power is nothing new,
but the change in power, for a few weeks, suggested a return to the state
of affairs that was interrupted by colonialism—a time and space when
Africans have the greatest say in the use of their land and the formation
of their culture. In that sense, what’s happening in Zimbabwe is another
verse in the longer song of struggle, where the past is always present and
the future available to be fought for.
Anakwa Dwamena is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.