African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe [Paperback]

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.

Chikowero has written a fantastic book worthy of wide and careful attention for years to come.

A worthy contribution to African history, ethnomusicology, music, and dance married together with the powerful institutions of African colonialism and missionary work.[P]rovides a fascinating new way to think about liberation. Chikowero helps us understand revolution beyond the gun as he moves from the conquest in the 1890s through music of the missions, mining company dancehalls, townships, the armed struggle campsites and more to chart a social history of how black people continually made and remade themselves through music, dress, drink, spirituality and politics.

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 Donts: 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 Afrl“$