Tracing the <i>Mbira</i> Sound Archive in Zimbabwe

Luis Gimenez Amoros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429012570
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe analyses the revitalisation and repatriation of historical recordings from the largest sound archive in Africa, the International Library of African Music (ILAM). It provides a postcolonial study on the African sound archive divided into three historical periods: the colonial period offers a critical analysis on how ILAM classifies its music through ethnic and linguistic groups; the postcolonial period reconsiders postcolonial nationhood, new/old mobility and cultural border crossing in present Africa; and the recent period of repatriation focuses on the author's revitalisation of the sound archive.

The main goal of this study is to reconsider the colonial demarcations of southern African mbira music provided by the International Library of African Music (ILAM). These mbira recordings reveal that the harmonic system used in different lamellophones (or mbiras ) in southern Africa is musically related. The analysis of sound archives in Africa is an essential tool to envision the new ways in which African culture can be directed not only from postcolonial notions of nationhood or Afrocentric discourses but also for the necessity of bringing awareness of the circulation of musical cultures from and beyond colonial African borders.

Part I

Reconsidering the Colonial Archive

1 The Mobilisation of Shona Musical Identity During Colonial Times

After the Berlin conference during 1884–1885, the partition of Africa by colonial powers provoked a disjunction in the cultural and social hegemony of many societies in the continent. The present African countries were not only created by colonial powers but were also distributed by the colonial nations mainly for the exploitation of the mineral resources from Africa. For this reason, the colonial map of Africa was named by Europeans “The Map of Africa by Treaty” (Wesseling, 1996: 4). The European countries that participated in the partition of Africa were the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Italy. The consequences of the partition still persist and, as a result, this was the beginning of a broad area of studies known as postcolonial studies in Africa that considers both the decolonisation and assimilation of the mentioned artificial borders. Postcolonial studies also deals with different aspects of the construction of postcolonial countries; therefore, it also examines the processes of decolonisation, colonialism, and neo-colonialism at present.

In particular, this chapter deals with the continuation of the Shona musical identity in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. For instance, considering the territorial problems found in southern Africa, one can find Ndebele communities in South Africa and Zimbabwe or Shona communities in Mozambique or Zimbabwe. The partition of African countries by Western European nations divided many African communities with ethnic and linguistic similarities in different colonial countries.

With regards to the colonial processes experienced by Zimbabwe, during the late nineteenth century, the British annexed Bechuanaland (present Botswana) in 1885 and gained access to the Zambezi River. “Southern Zambezia comprised Matebeleland and Mashonaland” (Wesseling, 1996: 293), in other words, the present territory of Zimbabwe. In 1891, the Matebeleland was officially called Rhodesia due to the colonial importance and power given to Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902).¹ Later, in 1897, Rhodesia was officially recognised and spread over Southern Rhodesia (present Zimbabwe) and Northern Rhodesia (present Zambia) (ibid.: 300).²

The mobilisation of Shona identity was primarily created by Southern Rhodesians. Southern Rhodesia was divided by the Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA) into two broad groups: Matebeleland and Mashonaland (Mazarire, 2002: 421).³ NADA was founded by missionaries and colonial administrators. This colonial administration divided Mashonaland by six groups with apparent linguistic and ethnic similarities named Karanga, Kalanga, Ndau, Zezuru, Manyika, and Kore Kore.

There are six basic dialects in the Shona language, and a specific type of mbira is found among each group although some do overlap. The dialects are Zezuru, Karanga, Korekore, Manyika, Kalanga and Ndau, and some of these dialects have sub-dialects as well. The Manyika mainly occupy the eastern parts of the country, the Karanga the south, the Zezuru the central parts of the country, the Korekore the north, the Kalanga the west, whilst the Ndau are in the southeast as shown in the map below. Generally people understand one another regardless; however, each dialect (and sub dialect) has its own distinct features which give rise to semantic differences in the language and peculiar intonations in speech.

(Gumboreshumba, 2009: 24)

The six Shona groups were created by the missionary stations placed in the six demarcated areas in Mashonaland. Thus, as Makoni, Brutt-Griffler and Mashiri (2007: 28) note, the Zezuru had the Roman Catholic Church and Wesleyan Methodist Church, the Manyika had the Anglican Church and United Methodist, the Ndau had the American Board Mission (American Methodist), the Kalanga had the London Missionary Society, and the Karanga had the Dutch Reformed Church (while the Kore Kore had none). In the attempt to proselytise Christianism, NADA created a language known as “standardised Shona” with the use of the six different languages found in Mashonaland. However, the creation of standardised Shona was mainly constructed by using Zezuru and Karanga because NADA associated other Shona dialects with the Nguni linguistic group from South Africa (ibid.: 29).

During the colonial period, among the six designated groups of Shona people, those individuals who had been converted to Christianity were forced to learn the newly standardised Shona in order to write a Bible that could be understood by the people inhabiting this geographical area.

As part of the interaction between the colonisers and local converts or non-converts, there were many settlers funded by NADA that developed a type of literature known as “intellectual tribalism” (Mazarire, 2002: 429).

Each official would tend to have his own favoured tribe or tribes. In the case of Southern Rhodesia specific ‘empires’ were created with J. Blake ‘Marhumbini’ Thompson carving out a niche in the lowveld, Harald von Sicard on Mberengwa, F.W.T. Posselt on Marandellas and Salisbury districts and so the list goes on. In this way a trend was set for generations of scholars to come, culminating in what I have termed intellectual tribalism elsewhere. The focus of these early ethnographies remained centred on the chiefs and chiefdoms where they worked. Tribal genealogies, histories, customs and folk tales were the inevitable products of these projects which were in the most cases perfected to ‘show off the degree of intimacy achieved with natives around a campfire’.

Mazarire demonstrates that intellectual tribalism was mostly based on the relationship between local chiefs and settlers. Hugh Tracey also developed a form of intellectual tribalism in his narratives on African music prominently funded by colonial institutions such as NADA in southern Rhodesia.

This type of colonial framework in Southern Rhodesia is defined by Mamdani (1996) as the relationship between the settler and the native (mostly chiefs) in order to manipulate the local history and to divide the local people by race and ethnicity.

Settlers and Natives: The Colonial Divisions Through Race and Ethnicity

According to Landau (2010: 1), before the tribalisation of southern Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, local people were accustomed to circulate along vast geographical trading routes beyond present geographical borders. For Landau, the colonial attempt to create tribal land was not only artificial but brutally forced because “popular mobilisations among African people were apolitical, customs-determined phenomena”. The invention of tribalised land and subsequent network of chiefs created by the colonists became the beginning of the indirect rule between settlers and “natives” in southern Africa.

The indirect rule made by colonial institutions consisted of controlling the tribalised geographical regions in order to impose hierarchical systems between natives and settlers. In Mamdani’s words,

The difference between the modern democratic state and its colonial version is this: the modern states ensure equal citizenship in political society while acknowledging difference in civil society, but its colonial counterparts institutionalised difference in both the polity and society.

(1996: 2)

This form of colonial system creates a native administration set by race and ethnicity (or the notion of tribe) such as the previously mentioned Native Affairs Department Annual (NADA), which served to create two main groups in Southern Rhodesia: the Shona and the Ndebele.

In this type of colonial system, Mamdani adds that “if settler cosmopolitanism claimed to be a product of race difference, native particularism was said to reflect the authenticity of the tribe” (ibid.: 3). The notion of authenticity by the settlers produced demarcated areas and kingships in the so-called tribal lands (ibid.: 7).

On the other hand, civil law is based on state policies and applies to citizens in non-demarcated tribal areas such as the settlers. The settler-citizen is not conditioned by customary laws in demarcated territories and is able to move throughout the country, favoured by the civil law (referred to as “civilised” people by the settlers). In other words, civil laws were designed by settlers to benefit their freedom of mobility either in settlers’ lands or “civil” lands. The creation of civil and customary law by colonial institutions is a potential form of control and domination over the “natives” because they are firstly controlled by their chiefs and secondly by the “civil” laws.

As a settler, Hugh Tracey benefited from the “civil” laws and his access to local culture was provided by colonial institutions such as NADA. Further to this, the study of mbira musical culture became based on the artificial territorialisation of music through the customary laws and ethnic categorisations.

Tradition and Mobilisation in Southern African Culture

In accordance with Mamdani on the use of customary law and its notion of tradition, the colonisers were the first to instil two core, erroneous beliefs:

One, that every colonised group has an original and pure tradition, whether religious or ethnic; and two, that every colonised group must be made to return to that original condition, and that the return must be enforced by law. Put together, these two propositions constitute the basic platform of every political fundamentalism in the colonial and the postcolonial world.

(1996: 50)

As part of the mobilisation of created communities by the colonial forces in southern Africa, Ranger (1983: 211) contributed to the unravelling of this conception of tradition by saying that:

The 1870s, 1880s and 1890s were the time of a great flowering of European invented tradition—ecclesiastical, educational, military, republican, monarchical. They were also the time of the European rush into Africa. There were many and complex connections between the two processes. The concept of Empire was central to the process of inventing tradition within Europe itself, but the African empires came so late in the day that they demonstrate the effects rather than the causes of European invented tradition.

In the United Kingdom, tradition was used to define the culture of the workers and rural areas. However, as Ranger (ibid.: 212) notes, the idea of workers or peasants among the local population in colonised African countries always appeared through the notion of natives in rural areas ruled by customary laws. Thus, tradition became localised through customary laws based on ethnicity and language.

In music, the notion of tradition is studied by location, ethnicity, and language; for instance, Irish music is related to Ireland or flamenco music is related to southern Spain. Through the notion of tradition, music is studied and identified in a geographically bounded location. The difference between the Western notion of traditional music and Shona musical identity is that the Shona is perceived as “static or native music” by many settlers and Western scholars. Firstly, the notion of Shona music would not exist if not for the project of tribalism through race and ethnicity by the settlers. Secondly, the study of Shona music enhances the interaction between the settler and native; furthermore, it frames the notion of musical tradition as a static, timeless, and fixed form of music in a demarcated area.

Tracey’s studies on southern African music have been examined through the representation of music by the geographical places assigned by the settlers. Additionally, during the colonial and even the postcolonial period, a great number of ethnomusicological studies on African music have tended to accentuate the notion of “native culture” (or ethnicity) and promote the problematic notion of authenticity in tribalised areas created by the colonies.

As an example, during the colonial period, Berliner’s (1978) study on Shona mbira music provided a colonial framework based on the geographical space of the Shona and did not challenge the social mobility of mbira music beyond Mashonaland. In other words, Berliner’s work uses the notion of traditional music through ethnic and linguistic categorisations that the colonial forces assigned in Mashonaland. On the other hand, Berliner’s study on the Shona mbira music offers valuable descriptions regarding the functionality of the bira ceremony to call the ancestors or for rainmaking ceremonies.

During the postcolonial period, Kubik (1988) is another ethnomusicologist that uses the colonial mapping of Africa for his studies on southern African music. Kubik’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Reconsidering the Colonial Archive
• Part II Reconsidering the Sound Archive and Postcolonial Nationhood
• Part III The Digital Return and Revitalisation Project of the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe
• References
• Discography
• Filmography
• Interviews
• Index