, Republic of.
Country in southern Africa. It has an area of 390,759 km2. The most vibrant forms of contemporary Zimbabwean music draw on indigenous traditions of the Shona, Ndebele and various minority linguistic groups; syncretic genres that emerged during the colonial period; music of Christian churches; and a variety of urban popular styles. European classical music has a relatively small presence, mainly among the white élite and the post-independence black élite. Chishona (Shona) is the mother tongue for approximately 71% and Sindebele (Ndebele) for 16% of a population of 12·39 million (2000 estimate). Many people also speak English, the former colonial language and now an official language. Europeans and Asians, the two largest foreign groups, comprise no more than 2% of the population. The majority of Zimbabweans live as agriculturalists/herders and farm labourers in rural areas, and 20% of the population live in Harare and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s two largest cities. For the black working class, there is much movement between urban townships and rural homesteads; both indigenous music styles and urban popular traditions are performed in the townships and countryside. There is a major collection of audio and video recordings of indigenous and urban popular music and dance in the National Archives of Zimbabwe in Harare.
THOMAS TURINO
Before the 19th century the region of Zimbabwe was inhabited by a number of local chieftaincies and kingdoms. Linguistic groups, including Zezuru, Korekore, Karanga, Ndau and Manyika, became known collectively as ‘the Shona’ during the colonial period. The Ndebele fled Zululand in South Africa in the early 19th century, taking over what is now south-western Zimbabwe near Bulawayo.
A variety of mission groups accompanied colonial occupation (1890–1980). Christianity has been widely accepted and adapted in myriad ways to indigenous religious beliefs. Shona religion, which remains central for many people, maintains relationships with family and lineage ancestors through spirit possession within special ceremonies. These ceremonies remain primary sites for indigenous musical performance along with guva (grave) ceremonies held a year after death, and at weddings, funerals, agricultural tasks such as grinding and threshing, and also at informal beer parties and jit dancing in rural areas and beerhall performances in the cities. Municipal governments and social organizations have held festivals for indigenous performers since the 1960s. Professional dance troupes also perform indigenous dance at tourist locations.
Hosho (gourd rattles) and a variety of ngoma (drums) are the most common indigenous instruments among the Shona and Ndebele. Short single-headed drums played with sticks as well as taller, 1.2 metre high single-headed drums played in pairs with hands are used for a variety of dance genres; the heads are attached with pegs and tuned with the application of heat to the drumhead. The Shona are well known for their performance of several regional types of Lamellophones, including the Zezuru mbira from the Harare area, the hera and matepe of Korekoreland in the north, the njari (fig.1), originally associated with south-central Zimbabwe, and the karimba. Each of these instruments has its own distinctive key arrangement, number of keys and tunings. Whereas the hera and matepe have remained largely localized in the north, the njari was widely diffused in the first half of the 20th century, later replaced by the 22 key Zezuru mbira as the most popular Shona lamellophone after the 1960s. The term mbira is sometimes used generically to refer to lamellophones; in such contexts the Zezuru mbira is distinguished by a variety of names such as mbira huro and mbira dza vadzimu.
Ngororombe panpipes are performed in large ensembles with drums, hosho and leg rattles in north-eastern Zimbabwe, usually in pairs with two and three tubes played in interlocking fashion. Several chipendani (fig.2) and mukube (mouth bows) are performed for informal entertainment. Less commonly, animal-horn trumpets are used as drones. Popularized by Kwanongoma Music College in Bulawayo since the 1960s, the marimba is now played throughout Zimbabwe. Most Zimbabwean genres involve solo or group singing.
Shona music is organized in cycles. Mbira and matepe pieces are based on cycles of four phrases of 12 fast pulses each (12/8); particularly common in ngororombe, karimba and a good deal of dance-drumming and choral vocal music are cycles comprising two 12/8 phrases. Dance-drumming genres may also have cycles of 16 (8/8) and 18 (9/8) pulses. The music is usually heptatonic with descending melodies. Responsorial singing and the interlocking or hocketing of many rhythmic and melodic parts at different structural levels are standard practice. Dense overlapping textures are favoured. Like much African music, instrumental and vocal parts may be categorized according to their ground and elaboration functions. Hosho, supporting drums, and the basic kushaura mbira part supply the foundational structures for elaboration by singers, lead drummers, accompanying mbira players and dancers. In choral music one group of singers may maintain the basic ostinato, which might be either a single melody or the resultant of call-and-response parts, while others provide overlapping, interlocking variations. Distinctive Shona vocal techniques include yodelling and a good deal of improvised singing on vocables; Ndebele singing often resembles slower Zulu choral styles with an emphasis on the outer voices.
There is a plethora of regional dance-drumming, instrumental and vocal genres. In Mashonaland these are often categorized by their relationship to spirit possession. The mbira and matepe genres are closely associated with spirit possession ceremonies that take place indoors, although this music is also frequently performed for secular occasions. Karimba are typically used in secular contexts, and njari have both ritual and non-ritual uses. Ngororombe is not associated with spirit possession but rather with recreational outdoor activities at weddings, beer drinks and guvas; guva ceremonies may involve spirit possession inside and other activities outside the house.
Among the dance-drumming genres in the north-east, dhinhe and dandanda are almost completely restricted to spirit possession ceremonies inside the house. Performed with call-and-response singing, hosho and two short drums, dandanda songs are typically two-phrase ostinato in 12/8 patterns. Like mbira dance music, dandanda is performed collectively. Dancers enter individually at will and move in their own personal styles. In the same region, the jerusarema dance is strictly associated with outdoor recreational activities. Performed with two tall ngoma (drums), hosho, woodblocks and vocals, jerusarema is a playful dance comprising active and resting sections of two 4/4 sections each. In the active sections, the male dancers clap interlocked patterns with woodblocks as a base for the drummer’s varied repertory of formulaic patterns; in the resting sections the male dancers are silent and the drummer plays a simple holding pattern. The men sing vocables and yodel throughout both sections. The main dancing by individuals, couples or groups of women during the active section involves a series of standardized moves, playful choreography and mime. Recreational dance-drumming genres, such as shangara from central Zimbabwe and mbukumba from further south, emphasize intricate rhythmic footwork. Muchongoyo, associated with the Ndau people of south-eastern Zimbabwe, is a militaristic dance style modelled on certain Nguni dances of South Africa and requires great choreographic precision. Isitchikitcha was originally a dance associated with spirit possession among the Ndebele, but more recently it is sometimes performed as a recreational dance.
Mission and government school singing generated several derivative styles. Adult choirs in urban townships maintained the same style comprising hymns, North American spirituals, choir music by black middle-class South African composers, and secular songs from England and the United States (e.g. Shortin’ Bread) sung with tonal harmonies in precise homophonic arrangements and enunciation of the texts. In contrast, makwaya emerged in rural areas and among the urban working class. Makwaya, like the term itself, which is an Africanization of ‘choir’, involved adaptation of school performance practices according to indigenous aesthetics. Makwaya singing variably combines triadic harmonies and homophonic singing with call-and-response, overlapping textures, freer variations, harmonies in 4ths and 5ths and indigenous vocal techniques such as yodelling.
Beginning in the 1920s European zithers, harmonicas, accordions and banjos were brought to Zimbabwe from South Africa by returning migrant workers. From the 1940s through the 1960s itinerant acoustic guitarists performed styles ranging from North American country and blues (Jimmie Rodgers was an important model) to a wide variety of local indigenous songs. Both recreational and religious dance-drumming songs were adapted to a two-finger picking style (thumb and index finger), with chords played in standard tunings to accompany the guitarists’ singing. Mbira pieces were performed with a slide, or bottle-neck, technique on guitars with open tunings. Innovative performers, including Jeremiah Kainga, Josaya Hadebe, George Sibanda, Ngwaru Mapundu and Pamidze Benhura, performed for tips in beerhalls, on streets and at township parties. These performers were sometimes hired to entertain farm workers and miners and were recorded for radio broadcast. In the 1950s and 60s acoustic guitarists superimposed fast 12/8 Shona rhythms onto South African chord progressions (e.g. I–IV–I–V) and tsaba, marabi and jive rhythms in moderate 4/4 time to create the jit, or jiti, dance genre. Jit was then diffused to rural villages where it is still performed with drums, hosho and group singing. In the 1970s and 80s jit was readapted to guitars by urban electric bands, and it remains one of the most prominent urban popular genres in Zimbabwe.
After World War II various mission groups began to foster an Africanization of church music in contrast to previous policies that discouraged indigenous music-making. Several missionaries who became prominent ethnomusicologists, including A.M. Jones, Robert Kauffman and John Kaemmer, were involved in this effort. Olof Axelsson characterized the resulting acculturated church music as incorporating responsorial singing, descending melodies, adherence to language tones, polyrhythmic structures and the use of parallel 4ths and 5ths as African, with adherence to diatonic scales and tonal harmony with the addition of 3rds as European. In contemporary Zimbabwe, African church performance runs the gamut from standard cosmopolitan repertory and style to the use of music and dance strongly based in indigenous styles, aesthetics and practices.
By the mid-1930s a form of urban popular concert music grew out of the school singing tradition in the townships of Harare and Bulawayo. As concert music emerged, the number of performers was reduced from the school choirs, and instrumental accompaniment in the form of a combination of guitar, piano, bass, traps and woodwinds was added, but the focal point was usually a vocal quartet, quintet or sextet. From the late 1940s through the 1960s these groups were closely modelled on the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots and also similar South African groups such as the Manhattan Brothers. Their concerts involved cosmopolitan popular music, carefully choreographed dance, and skits for well-dressed, middle-class African audiences in township recreation halls. Kenneth Mattaka’s Bantu Actors was the prototype, and sometimes training ground, for many of the most prominent groups, such as De Black Evening Follies, the Epworth Theatrical Strutters, the City Quads, the Golden Rhythm Crooners and the Cool Four. Dorothy Masuka, Zimbabwe’s first international singing star, was born in Bulawayo. Performing in a style reminiscent of Miriam Makeba, she worked in South Africa with Makeba and the Manhattan Brothers and in Zimbabwe with the Golden Rhythm Crooners in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She lived and performed outside the country from the mid-1960s to 1980.
The origin of many instrumental jazz and dance bands in Zimbabwe may be traced to the Police Band, which supplied instruments and training for members who moonlighted. August Musarurwa, Zimbabwe’s most revered jazz saxophone player and composer, left the Police Band in 1947 and formed the Cold Storage Band, later renamed the Bulawayo Sweet Rhythm Band. He recorded his international hit, Skokiaan (referring to illicit alcohol), with this group for Gallo of South Africa (GB11 52.T); sheet music with words by Tom Glazer was published by Gallo in 1952. The text refers to ‘happy, happy Africa’, and this may be the source for the title of Louis Armstrong’s version of the song. Musarurwa’s music was known as tsaba-tsaba, a southern African derivation of swing in duple metre on simple harmonic vamps (e.g. I–IV–I–V, I–V). Musarurwa and other Zimbabwean jazz bands emphasized the basic melody more and improvisation less than their North American counterparts. Jazz dance bands, including the Harare Hot Shots and the City Slickers, performed for both black and white ballroom dancing, a particularly popular activity among the colonial black middle class.
The acoustic guitar, concert and jazz traditions declined in popularity with the advent of rock-and-roll around 1960. A host of young combos comprising two electric guitars, bass, traps, vocals and occasionally saxophones emerged during the 1960s and 70s. At first their repertories included covers of North American rock and rhythm and blues artists; rumba and cha cha cha diffused to Zimbabwe by Zaïrean bands after the late 1950s, and, in the late 1960s, South African mbaganga, an electrified, bass-heavy style of urban jive in duple metre. The liberalization of liquor laws and the opening of African night clubs after 1957 inspired the formation of new bands with professional aspirations. Between 1966 and 1974 groups such as the Harare Mambos, the Springfields with Thomas Mapfuno, Saint Paul’s Band, the Zebrons and the Beatsters experimented with adapting indigenous Shona songs to rock rhythms and styles as part of their bid to appeal to new audiences.
A gradual shift from rock-based to indigenous aesthetics and style occurred as this trend progressed. In 1968, M.D. Rhythm Success included indigenous drums and drumming in their guitar-band rendition of a jit song in 12/8, and in 1973 they recorded, in indigenous style, a song based on the classical mbira piece Kuzanga (Gallo GB.3739 and GB.3815). In 1974, Lipopo Jazz, originally a Harare-based Zaïrean rumba band, recorded a song based on the mbira piece Taireva (GB.3868), as did Thomas Mapfumo with Joshua Hlomayi and the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, Ngoma Yarira, based on Karigamombe (Teal AS 105). For this genre the four-phrase mbira cycle is performed with a damped technique by the guitar, bass and sometimes keyboards and with the drummer playing the triplets of the hosho part on the highhat. In conjunction with the Liberation War of the 1970s, urban audiences were increasingly receptive to arrangements of indigenous music. A number of electric bands, including Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited, Oliver M’tukudzi, Jonah Sithole and Storm, Jordan Chataika and the Highway Stars, the Green Arrows, among others, were performing indigenous-based music with political lyrics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thomas Mapfumo emerged as the foremost national and international exponent of this style in the 1980s and 90s. In the mid-1980s he added mbira players to his band and continued to develop his indigenous style of singing. In response to Mapfumo’s international success, a new generation of bands emerged in the late 1980s that performed jit, mbira music and a variety of other indigenous Shona and Ndebele genres, thus maintaining this unique Zimbabwean style alongside other international popular styles.
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