Place and Date: University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, 2005
Interviewer: Banning Eyre
Thomas Turino is a professor of musicology and anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After conducting extensive field work in Zimbabwe during the 1990s, he published “Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe” (University of Chicago Press, 2000). A complex work examining the role of music in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and establishment of statehood, Turino’s book provides an excellent account of the social, political, and historical circumstances in which Thomas Mapfumo rose as a composer, singer, and bandleader. In October, 2005, Banning Eyre sat down to talk with Turino for the Afropop Worldwide program “Thomas Mapfumo: The War Years.”
Here’s their conversation:
Banning Eyre: How did you first get interested in Zimbabwe?
Thomas Turino: My first area of research was Andean music in Peru. As a beginning graduate student, however, I encountered Paul Berliner’s book, The Soul of Mbira, and the accompanying Nonesuch records of Shona mbira music, and I was hooked on the sound. The first time I heard mbira music performed live was at an musicology conference in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1980, and it was Ephat Mujuru playing. It was so beautiful, I think I cried. I loved it.
Paul’s book was very influential in the process of bringing the mbira into what has become a cosmopolitan canon of world music traditions, traditions any world music fan should know or any world music textbook should include, just as European music history texts must include Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the other figures of that canon. But actually, Zimbabwe has many types of musical traditions, probably the dance-drumming and choral being most common, but it was really the mbira that caught the international imagination. I think that its sound and music produced a good fit with cosmopolitan aesthetics. It had a familiar aspect to it, a sweet aspect that fit our aesthetics, and yet at the same time, it was distinctive. So this mbira-centric view of Zimbabwean music influenced the reception and conception of Thomas Mapfumo in world music circles outside Zimbabwe after the mid-1980s.
B.E: You use the word cosmopolitan in a particular way. Can you define it?
T.T: When I use the word cosmopolitan, I’m thinking of a particular kind of cultural formation, or culture group. Cosmopolitans are bound together by shared habits of thought and practice, and technologies. So when I use the word cosmopolitan I am not thinking of individuals. I'm thinking of a cultural group that is spread out throughout the world, but united by common modes of communication and thinking.
B.E: Why don’t you give us a kind of social/historical snapshot of Rhodesia in 1970—say, in the 60s leading up to 1970?
T.T: To understand the development of Mapfumo’s style in the late 1960s and 1970s we have to go back at least to the beginnings of mass nationalism in late 1950s and to the rise of the black middle class as a separate cultural group in the 1930s. Most countries in the world have a variety of cultural groups within their boundaries; this is still true of Zimbabwe and was certainly true of Rhodesia before independence in 1980. In Rhodesia there was no unified cultural group that could be considered a nation. There were a variety of regionally based indigenous social groups each with their own musical traditions, as well as this middle class that I was beginning to describe. Through the process of mission education and growing up on mission station land a black middle class began to emerge as yet another distinctive cultural group. It was this group that internalized capitalist ethics and the value of personal accumulation, as well as Christianity. Through European and North-American-based missionary education, they also learned the principles of nationalism—that each social group should rule itself through its own government.
What's interesting to me is that in Shona, for instance, there was no word for "nation." It wasn't a local conception. It was a conception that Zimbabweans learned through North American and European missionary education. The African middle class also internalized European and North American aesthetics in terms of clothing styles, music and dance styles, styles of weddings, and culinary styles—all the things that we think about as being part of culture. In the first phase of this process, in a colonial situation, like in Zimbabwe, the people are imitating a model that's coming from somewhere else. And here again, the vehicle is this mission education. What's important to me is the people who grew up, say, on mission station land, which is really separated from the indigenous sections of the country that were still thriving time. It was not that that a cosmopolitan culture took over the indigenous one. But people who grew up on mission station lands, who grew up in middle class households, start to be socialized in a different way, and they start to be socialized with these ideas that come from elsewhere.
But here's the key thing. These new cultural elements become localized in these people's life experiences, so that when they pray to Jesus, or they go ballroom dancing, it is no longer that they are imitating Europeans. At this point, they are really doing something that is coming out of their own cultural background, although in Zimbabwe, it was a minority cultural background. This is what I think of as a cosmopolitan moment, when the cosmopolitan formation really starts to form a particular place. It is through the internal generation of those practices that are done in London, that are done in New York, nowadays in Tokyo—but now, in Harare they're being done, by people who grew up in households where these were common practices. That's what I think of as the process of creating a cosmopolitan cultural formation.
B.E: So what was foreign for their parents or grandparents is no longer foreign to them.
T.T: It’s who they are. So the reason I was interested in understanding cosmopolitanism as a cultural formation in this way is that the old ways of talking about African and European, or Western and African, as a kind of dichotomy, seemed wrong to me, because there were people in Zimbabwe who when they went ballroom dancing, or they performed jazz, it wasn't that they were performing a foreign style. These things had already been in their family, and in their cultural group, for several generations. This is certainly true for Thomas, who comes to this after these traditions are localized by local performers, and created locally in a distinctive way.
So the other aspect of cosmopolitanism for me is that while you're sharing ideas like automobiles, money, that you should save money, that certain kinds of education are good—all these values that we think of as normal in middle class America—those values get spread their through colonialism, but then they take root within a particular cultural group and they are localized. But at the same time, cosmopolitanism always coexists with unique aspects from the area in question. So an African cosmopolitan might still believe in witchcraft, for instance.
B.E: Yes, I noticed that in West Africa, in Mali. But there, I always had the sense that people had a stronger sense of history than did people in Zimbabwe. Malians seem more protected from absorbing foreign culture because they have a stronger sense of history.
T.T: The other thing is that the Malian culture is an elite culture. It had a centralized state. And we see this in the musical traditions themselves, highly developed specialists who can stand on stage with anyone wherever they go. It was a type of civilization that was more akin to the European, cosmopolitan civilizations that it was coming in contact with, as opposed to a peasant society, for instance, when you don't have the specialists. Zimbabweans did not have the same cultural mechanisms in place to preserve their own history.
But let me say this. I think this is important. We get these images that once westernization takes hold a certain place, then it sweeps the whole place, and once colonialism started in Zimbabwe, then all indigenous traditions go by the wayside. That is not the case. What I'm trying to describe for Zimbabwe is that the emergence of this small middle class that has cosmopolitan ways, that can speak to people in New York in London on the same terms because their part of the same formation. However, simultaneously in time, throughout the colonial period and to the present day, there are other cultural formations in Zimbabwe, which I’ll just call for the sake of ease, indigenous cultural formations. The belief system is different. The practices are different. The musical aesthetics, I would argue, are radically different. And these things exist in parallel. In other words, there is a kind of macro historical narrative that said, "Colonialism rubbed out indigenous Shona music and dance, and it was replaced by modern jazz and other cosmopolitan styles." I don't agree with that view. I think that the indigenous music making was powerful throughout the colonial period. It remains powerful today. It's just in another cultural formation. It's in other places. It's in what were called the Tribal Trust Lands earlier on, in rural areas, and in the working-class townships. There are still a lot of monolingual Shona speakers in the working-class townships today.
There are some people in those places, in fact a fair amount of people, that are part of a deifferent cultural formation. There is interchange between people certainly, but I would say that they make decisions differently. One of my acid tests for thinking about cultural formations is how you make decisions. What is your basis? Is it about capital accumulation? Or is it about what the ancestors might say about a particular action? Those are two very different bases for making a decision. And those would be the kind of indicators that I would use to think about whether somebody was really in the cosmopolitan formation in Zimbabwe, or largely in an indigenous formation.
Everybody thinks of history as this neat linear phenomenon. There's just one line of history, so when this stuff is coming in, the other stuff has to go out. People think that way, and it's just not the case. You've got lots of tracks, but it's the middle class track the gets reported on, because that’s who the cosmopolitans are interested in. So all this other stuff is going on, but nobody's paying attention to it. That's how culture works. The cosmopolitan loop. There's also ethnomusicological loops. The ethnomusicologist shows up and all the professional informants come out of the woodwork and talk to you, because they are you been trained by earlier scholars what to do.
I was talking about how the African middle class internalizes the social style and cultural style, and then starts to produce its own version of it. I want to always argue that it is this particular pocket, this middle class pocket, who become really prominent, because they're the ones who ultimately take over the government and the institutions. They are the ones who are found in print, who get to go to conferences in London and so on. But there's this other, vibrant cultural formation going on in the villages that doesn't get the same amount of attention, precisely because they're not cosmopolitan. They don't talk the talk, walk the walk, and they're not as available to people in the cosmopolitan formation.
B.E: Okay, but when we talk about traditional music in Zimbabwe, there is a pervasive idea that the Rhodesians discouraged it. To some extent, where mbira is concerned, there is something to this, especially in terms of missionary activity. Wouldn’t you agree?
T.T: Throughout the colonial period, indigenous dance drumming, panpipe playing, mbira playing, and choral music continued on within indigenous communities and in working class townships with great vitality. There is a common idea in Africa in general, but certainly in Zimbabwe, that the colonial government, and missionaries, tried to stamp out indigenous musical practices and dances and so on. There is some truth to this in certain Mission groups, but even there are there's quite a variety. But my research indicates that this is not so and that indigenous Shona music remained vibrant, as it does today. In fact, beginning in the post-World War II era, the government-controlled radio station began recording all types of indigenous music The idea was to attract and keep Africans tuned into government controlled radio, but in the process they recorded and diffused many types of indigenous musics outside the regions they were originally associated with. One unintentional outcome of this was to help break down regional cultural differences, which, ironically served the nationalist cause of unifying the different indigenous groups culturally.
Let's take the colonial government, for instance. The government controlled radio actually went out of their way in the post-World War II era to record all types of indigenous dance drumming, choral music, popular music, mbira music, to be aired on the African Service radio programs. Why did they do this? Out of love for indigenous music? Probably not. They wanted to keep listeners tuned in to the government controlled radio so they wouldn't tune in to radio Moscow or something. But the effect of this was to actually archive this stuff. These recordings are still in the Zimbabwean archive today. And it did something else too. I mentioned earlier that there were all these different, regional, indigenous groups. All these traditions were links to a particular area and to a particular group. When the radio picks them up and begins to air them widely, they begin to cross those regional boundaries, and people begin to know traditions from other regions. And in a funny way, they helped promote the same process that nationalists themselves were trying to promote, which is to break down regional and so-called tribal barriers, to get Zimbabweans to think of themselves as one group. Well, the radio had an impact in that. So to say that the colonial government tried to squash these things is inaccurate. They held festivals. They recorded and aired this stuff on the radio.
B.E: Perhaps those claims apply more to an earlier period. These radio broadcasts come later on in the Rhodesian history, right?
T.T: Yes, post-World War II. But even earlier, the picture is not so clear. What I've been trying to talk about with culture as a concept is that in any one place, you're going to have a lot of different possibilities, different formations existing. And within any particular cultural formation, you have a lot of different individuals. Some missionaries, I was told, loved traditional music and dance. Some did not. There was a variety there, denominational variety. So these kind of macro stories that we get in different places don't take human variety and idiosyncrasies into account.
B.E: So it doesn't mean that the stories we hear about in mbiras being taken away, and children being humiliated are not true. It's just that there are other stories too. But don’t you think that the Shona, decentralized, and weakened at the time Rhodes arrived, were especially vulnerable to acculturation?
T.T: Well, we don't want to overstate the separation from the past either. It's just a shortened past. So that within the indigenous culture, for instance, I argue that spirit possession ceremonies are a force for conservatism. You have to get particular ancestors into the ceremony. You have to play the music that they liked when they were alive. You have to play the same tunes, and you have to play them supposedly in the way they liked. So that whole tradition is a force for conservatism, it just simply doesn't go back all the centuries that you have in Mali. But I would not say that history is unimportant. It is. It's just a shorter history. It's a history that is linked to actual individuals that somebody knows. So it's like a small community as opposed to a larger civilization where there are structures that keep more abstract relationships in existence.
There are spirits which are much further back, clan spirits, mhondoro spirits. But a lot of the action, a lot of the energy in terms of ceremonies for the ancestors, is one’s own family ancestors that go back through generations and generations. So it's the closeness. These ancestors are family members, and they care about us in the present, and they're watching out for us in the present. So with that kind of attitude, it's more intimate, more face-to-face.
B.E: But it also means that the ancestors who people are communicating with are all tied up with the colonial history, because that's the history they grew up with. This is what I mean what I say that the colonial history looms so much larger in Zimbabwe than in, say, Mali.
T.T: Well, I'm not so sure it does looms so much larger for certain pockets. Again, it looms larger for cosmopolitans, because they're interested in playing that game. For indigenous peasants, who are still subsistence farmers, I'm not sure it does loom so large. But this is a whole other topic. Let me say this. In the nationalist war period, there is this image that it was a populist movement, and peasants were all behind the guerillas and the leadership and so forth. That is not the case. There were special comrades who had to go out and try to politicize the country along Maoist principles. People were not on board just automatically. The idea of nationalism as this kind of groundswell, natural idea--that we should all want our own government. That was a foreign idea. And these were localized groups. They were not necessarily on board. Nationalism in Zimbabwe was a middle-class-led, and in a lot of ways, peopled, movement. Indigenous people certainly understood the colonial situation. They were moved off their land. And they were moved around in a way that was really very difficult for them because of spiritual connections to the land. So they were aware that they were under a colonial régime. But on a day-to-day basis, once they were left to themselves, whether this impinged on them to the extent that it did on the middle-class who had different aspirations, I'm not sure.
B.E: Let’s come back to music. You write about the indigenous music going on in the urban townships. Talk about that.
T.T: In the central market area of the main working-class township of Harare or Salisbury at the time, you had dance drumming and indigenous music every Sunday. Migrant groups from the rural areas, who were wage workers in the city, or domestics, performed this music. So this music is going on, but in parallel, you have a whole different kind of tradition emerging within this black middle class that comes up in the 1930s. And in fact, this type of music was directly out of the mission schools. These kids were trained to sing European harmony, and were trained to an aesthetic system that is radically different. In indigenous music, for instance, you get dense textures, lots of overlapping, lots of variation on the melody. All this creates this dense wall of sound, with highly percussive-based backing on drums, or hosho shakers. And the music is participatory at its core. Anyone can join in whenever they want, and it has the feeling of spontaneity. The way a particular performance goes depends on the moment of performance. In contrast to that, and as part of this emerging, cosmopolitan formation of life, middle-class Zimbabweans in mission school learn to read music. They learn to create very transparent, very clear textures. They sing all the same notes at the same time and rhythm, with well-balanced harmony. The diction of the text is important. And they sing sometimes even really strange songs, American songs like “I Ride in Old Paint” or “Shortnin’ Bread.” I've heard old recordings of school choirs singing these things in a style that is definitely influenced by the school singing tradition, this mission singing tradition, and yet it is distinctive. And that's where I come back to this notion of cosmopolitan. It’s this notion of things that are done in lots of places, like western harmony for instance, but always with a kind of separate, in this case, Zimbabwean accent.
Okay, so the kids coming out of these choirs read music. They have developed this taste for very clearly arranged music, lots of nice contrasts, European harmonies, and so on and so forth. They begin to create their own traditions. They moved to Harare to try to get clerk jobs, or other jobs that are open to the black middle class, and they start to create their own groups, and they model these groups on African-American groups, like the Mills Brothers, or the Ink Spots, or different jazz groups. There were also groups from South Africa that served as models for these Zimbabweans. And so they started creating their own vocal quartets, quintets, backed by jazz band instrumentation. And jazz musicians were coming out of the military bands, which is standard practice in Africa in general. You have instrumentalists playing horns, often learned in military bands, or police bands.
One popular group beginning in the 1940s, and all the way through the beginning of the 1960s, was a group called the Black Evening Follies, and they spelled their name “De Black Evening Follies,” almost an imitation of dialect, coming out of the minstrel tradition in the United States. They performed at situations that were polite, middle class, sit-down concerts in recreation halls in the urban townships, for middle-class audiences. And one of the things that people always told me is these concerts were so quiet you could hear a pin drop. All the attention was on the performers on the stage. They were so polite that you could take your mother-in-law, which is the acid test in Zimbabwe to respectability. So they would have these concerts in the recreation halls on weekends, and they were variety shows, and they would do all the cosmopolitan styles of the day. In this one group, the Black Evening Follies, they kept up the cosmopolitan styles. For a lot of their tunes, they would come out on stage with carefully, politely choreographed dance, and sing Mills Brothers song very much in that style.
As time goes on, as rock-and-roll hits the world in the late 1950s the Black Evening Follies was one of the first groups to play rock-and-roll. Say, around 1958 to 1962, you could have heard in the same Black Evening Follies concert a Mills Brothers tune and a song imitating Little Richard or Elvis Presley. Sophistication and smoothness were important aspects of performance for the black middle class in Zimbabwe, because that was part of their sense of who they were. Again, I'm arguing that this is not simply an imitation, but that they were part of the same formation that valued a tightly organized, sophisticated sound. These were now their own values. It's what they learned in school, so they would reproduce those things.
When Thomas Mapfumo began learning cosmopolitan musical styles as a teenager, he could have obviously turned to recordings, and the radio, and hear these recordings from afar, but what's interesting to me is he also had local models. There were a number of different groups, Black Evening Follies, they Cool Fours, Epworth Theatrical Strutters, who were playing cosmopolitan music. These groups start performing jazz, and later rock-and-roll, in the townships, so that young Zimbabwe's could go to these concerts in the city and hear local performers doing rock-and-roll. This is again this notion of cosmopolitanism. It had formed its own roots in this place method formed its own roots in this place, and there were local models. Young Zimbabweans could learn from older Zimbabweans, these traditions, not as foreign things, but as local.
Read more of this interview at
AfroPop.orgCreative Industry links, music business directory, online promotion for creatives:
Get Access to Unlimited Music Downloads plus P2P Software Help, Only $1.00 a month. Click Here for more...
Most Popular Electronic Gifts, at Amazon.com
Create Magazine - Subscribe to regional issues, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta Try Rhapsody for 14 days FREE and get unlimited listening access to 1,000,000+ songs from 45,000+ artists.
Hurricane Relief CD, Come Together Now
Above here are arts, culture and music links list plus seo and blog engine optimization
