Versions and Sub-Versions: Trends in Chimurenga Musical Discourses of Post Independence Zimbabwe

Abstract

The term chimurenga comes from the name of a legendary Shona ancestor, Murenga Sororenzou. Believed to be a huge man with a head (soro) the size of an elephant' s (renzou), Murenga was well known for his fi ghting spirit and prowess, and legend has it that he composed war-songs to encourage his soldiers to continue the fi ght against their enemies in pre-colonial Zimbabwe. In the 1970s, African freedom fighters in bases in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia, and some local Zimbabwean artists struggling for Zimbabwe' s independence, derived inspiration from Murenga's fighting spirit and composed songs in a genre that they called chimurenga. The word chimurenga refers to war or the struggle against any form of tyranny, and songs that capture the sentiment of war and the longing for freedom became chimurenga music. Blacks in Zimbabwe talk of chimurenga in the singu- lar (chi+murenga), but there have actually been various (Zvi+murenga) fought on different cultural sites during and after colonialism. Chimurenga protested the colonial exploitation of Africans and also criticized the oppression of women in African society. Some critics of Chimurenga music think that there is only one version of chimurenga, and have mistakenly reported its demise in 1980. After Zimbabwean independence, chimurenga continued as a ve- hicle for criticizing corruption, poor governance by new leaders, and delays in redistributing land to the African masses. Post-independence (and invariably male) Zimbabwean singers with various levels of political consciousness, using different linguistic strategies, have cre- ated alternative versions of chimurenga that attempt to generate a local discourse of freedom in an era of globalization and corporate organizations that, in effect, controls the production and distribution of chimurenga.