Chimurenga

"Chimurenga" is the Shona word for "struggle." The term goes back at least to the 1890s when the Shona majority of Southern Rhodesia rose up against their recently arrived British colonial rulers, only to be narrowly defeated. By the 1960s a new struggle was underway, and this one—the so-called "second chimurenga"—would result in the emergence of independent Zimbabwe in 1980.

Music played an important role in Zimbabwe's war of liberation. As the fight intensified, guerrillas would commandeer a village or neighborhood and gather all its residents for a pungwe, an all-night political meeting that always included the singing of chimurenga songs. These could be hymns, traditional melodies, folk or pop songs—any familiar tune, but with lyrics altered to educate citizens about the goals, strategies and philosophy of the struggle. Revolutionary radio broadcasts originating in neighboring Mozambique further disseminated chimurenga songs along with news about the progress of the war. The program Voice of Zimbabwe, broadcast from Mozambique, was massively popular anywhere in Zimbabwe that the station could be heard. Zimbabwe's major nationalist organizations eventually had their own choirs who performed lavishly harmonized renditions of chimurenga songs, which were recorded for broadcast. Radios became such prized items among guerrillas in the bush that government infiltrators built radios equipped with tracking devices and gave them to guerrilla units in order to follow their movements. They knew these radios would never be left behind.

During the 1970s, the struggle began to have a profound affect on popular musicians inside the country as well. Bar bands had mostly played cover music up to that point, including everything from jazz and R&B to rock 'n' roll, cha cha cha, rumba from the Congo and popular township styles from South Africa. Now, popular singers began writing their own songs, singing in Shona and Ndebele (the other major language of Zimbabwe), and using indigenous folkloric music and dance as the basis for modern, electric pop songs. To an extent, the mere act of singing in local African languages and dignifying local traditions was political. Rhodesian missionaries and educators had tended to stigmatize local customs, delivering a message that the more you took on English language, customs and beliefs, the more likely you were to succeed. But local Zimbabwean ways had not disappeared, only gone underground, and now they began to reemerge with explosive creative energy.
Among the singers who spearheaded this new movement were Oliver Mtukudzi, Safirio Madzikatire and Zexie Manatsa and the Green Arrows. But none approached the endeavor with more passion, commitment and creativity than Thomas Mapfumo. Mapfumo came up as a rock 'n' roll singer in the '60s but he grew dissatisfied with imitation and began experimenting, using the electric guitars in his band to interpret the sounds, rhythms and melodies of traditional Shona music. His most powerful source was the iron-pronged mbira, an instrument long associated with religious, spirit possession ceremonies. In 1974, with a group called Hallelujah Chicken Run Band, Mapfumo released a song called "Ngoma Yarira," or "The Drum Is Sounding." It was a guitar adaptation of an ancient mbira song, one of many to come. The guitarists damped their notes to evoke the distinctive plinking of mbira keys. Furthermore, the song's lyrics obliquely suggested a call to arms. The drums were sounding because it was time to go to war. The song was a hit, and Mapfumo had found the creative path that would one day make him the most popular singer in the country. The Rhodesians remained in charge, and Mapfumo could not proclaim his purpose openly, but within his circle, he began referring to these new songs as "chimurenga music."

After the war, it was fashionable for popular musicians to wrap themselves in the glory of the struggle, and for a time, other singers embraced the chimurenga tag. If Thomas Mapfumo was the king of chimurenga music, then singer Robson Banda was the prince of chimurenga music. Some veteran musicians felt that the original chimurenga songs—the ones created in those wartime pungwes—were being lost or overshadowed. But such is the fast-changing world of pop music. For a short period, it seemed that any singer with an ounce of patriotism considered his or her music to be chimurenga music. In time, though, this too changed. Groups interpreting mbira music began to call their sound mbira, not chimurenga. Other genre classifications emerged, including jit and sungura, describing different varieties of guitar-based, recreational pop music. By the mid-'90s, only Mapfumo still proclaimed the chimurenga identity, reinforcing it with a stream of album titles: Chimurenga for Justice, Chimurenga Masterpiece, Chimurenga International, Sweet Chimurenga, Roots Chimurenga, Afro Chimurenga, Chimurenga Movement and more. Over the course of those albums, Mapfumo also became increasingly disillusioned with the Zimbabwean government, and his use of the term chimurenga seemed less and less a reference to the liberation war and more a comment on the ongoing need to struggle for rights and freedoms still denied to ordinary people. As Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe-led government grew more authoritarian, singing politics became as problematic for pop musicians as it had been in Rhodesia.

The worldwide popularity of Mapfumo and other Zimbabwean singers led to an impression that chimurenga was somehow a genre of popular music, like reggae, zouk or mbaqanga. In fact, if you go to Zimbabwe today and talk about "chimurenga music," people will think either that you are talking about those old songs created during the war or else the music of the one man who has clung to the chimurenga identity fiercely for three decades: Thomas Mapfumo. .Banning Eyre (Afropop Worldwide)