The reconfiguring of the outlaw in Zimbabwe
In the days of HIV, people would say, “Lo, ushonile” [“So and so has passed away”]. Someone would ask, “What happened?” and people would say, “Bekagula” [“They were sick”]. You generally knew what that meant.
When Ian Smith said there wouldn’t be majority rule, “not in a thousand years, not in my lifetime”, Thomas Mapfumo came out with Pamuromo Chete — which meant “This is mere talk”.
People knew exactly who and what he was referring to. The whites had considered him a terrorist. Remember this guy [Tobias] ordinarily wasn’t a Jamaican chanter, but a backing vocalist. I think that’s the only song in which he does lyrics in that style and in English.
Also, I would say at that point, the facility with that chanting style was still in its rudimentary stage. Remember it was the year 1985. People hadn’t quite mastered it. I think the mastering happened only after 2000, maybe around 2002 or 2003.
You look at people like Jah Seed [from kwaito group Bongo Maffin] whose chanting style isn’t as sophisticated as what we have now. So people were still trying to make sense of the whole thing. Remember it was a foreign idiom and no one quite knew how to use it.
Yeah, you could say that. I guess what I was trying to do is to say Thomas Mapfumo is the godfather of all these things. We speak of King Tubby as the godfather of all dance music, you know, dubstep, jungle, etcetera. Even though Tubs himself might find some of the sounds that fed off what he was doing strange, and in this piece I was trying to say Thomas Mapfumo is the godfather of this Zimdancehall moment even though, at first glance, it doesn’t appear so. The whole article, you could say, is a paean, some praise poem to the ghettos, the smithy of this sound. I don’t think I would describe it as violence, more a simple recognition that we can’t, in this music, do what Chinua Achebe did with the English language in Things Fall Apart or Arrow of God. That, instead, we have to do what Ngugi proposes in Decolonising the Mind.
Chant in our own language because it’s the language we know best. Remember most of the genre’s practitioners, I would guess, are more comfortable in Shona than in English.
But you could say it’s a rebellion to the British colonial project that Mugabe espoused and represented. In a sense when Bob Marley and the Wailers came in 1980 they switched things. That [independence celebration] concert was meant to be for VIPs but people broke down the walls. Marley had played for Mugabe at his house. This I left out of the piece: he speaks with revulsion of being served cucumber sandwiches by black men in starched clothes. So the next day the government people decided to do a more public show because they gauged that Marley seemed to be popular [with the masses].
There is this respect in Zimbabwe for guys who look like outlaws or are seen to be outlaws. A filmmaker I know says he was once out at night with a camera and was able to talk his way out of a tense meeting with a pro-Zanu-PF militia purely because he had dreadlocks.
So you can see why the music of the outlaw has gained acceptance 20 to 30 years after liberation. It’s almost like the outlaw gaining mainstream acceptance.