Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (review)

Abstract

The development of commercial industrial metropolises in the southern African region during the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) gave rise to the influx of migrant labor from rural outbelts to the urban townships. When migrant laborers arrived from these labor colonies that supplied the mining and manufacturing industries of the federation, they brought their bodies and their cultures. Their music, dance, and theater became the raw material of a new kind of cultural production and, as such, vehicles of adaptation to the urban environment. The process of adaptation is not the mere conversion of the rural to the urban; it also means immersion into the capitalist economy. Thomas Turino's book situates itself in the relationship that evolved between the indigenous and the cosmopolitan/global in the development of musical professionalism in Zimbabwe. The relationship between the cultural institutions of transnational capital (the entertainment industry) and indigenous Third World cultural expressions demonstrates the tendency of hegemonic institutions to absorb and control Third World images and the tendency of these images to puncture popular notions of pleasure. In this collaboration there is tension between the ideological frame of reference represented by the agency of transnational capitalism and that of indigenous cultural expression born out of local traditions and a culture of resistance to colonial subjugation.