A new song? Subverting discourses of death and ancestral purity in Zimbabwe's music

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to explore the changing perceptions on the discourses of death and purity as articulated in African popular music. In African traditional cultures, the death of a human being is considered a sacred event. It is viewed with fear, confusion and as dislocator of assumed human connectivity and it is then considered inhuman to celebrate the death of tyrant, dictator and even common thieves. African poetry abound in imagery that depicts death as the nemesis and the antithesis of life. These commonplace views on death and purity have been given philosophical justification in Afrocentric writings. The problem is that these views (of death) fail to explain and morally justify when, if ever, the death of a human being should be celebrated. In recent writings and popular culture in Zimbabwe, popular musicians have “crossed the line” and have, in fact, begun to sing of death as sometimes a desirable necessity that can end serious social ills. Epistemological discourses that equate death with purity have also failed to distinguish death as metonym and death as metaphor. In this article, Wafawanaka, a song made popular by the Zimbabwean singer Extra Large in post-independence Zimbabwe is explored in order to reveal and problematise the shifts that have taken place in the discourses of death as purity (i.e. against the emergence of those discourses that argue that death is desirable in some contexts because it ameliorates human suffering).