African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe
Mhoze Chikowero
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.
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About Mhoze Chikowero
Reviews for African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe
Journal of African History
This book makes a valuable contribution to colonial and mission history, musicology, and performance studies, offering a fresh lens on the creative labor and insurgent cultural practices of Zimbabweans under colonialism.
International Journal of African Historical Studies
[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.
The Guardian
Chikowero interrogates the political economy of performance in Zimbabwe with a mastery of detail that is yet to be matched.9/12/16
The Zimbabwe Herald
African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe will benefit ethnomusicologists as well as multimedia experts and general readers. Chikowero makes a tremendous contribution to African music in general and, indeed, ethnomusicology in particular.
Africa Today
Overall,the book encourages a stimulating rethinking of the role of music in colonial societies. It is therefore recommended for readers with a broad interest in African history.
American Historical Review