Hokoyo is a great Zim album
the troubled son-in-law, disqualified, henpecked and even left for dead, from Sungano to Maria and the Charma Girl collaboration. This is hardly surprising. Zimbabwean musicians are the most troubled sons-in-law in the world. James Chimombe is made to stone snakes and thatch huts in Mukuwasha. Mpopoma in-laws shake out Lovemore Majaivana’s pockets all day in Mkwenyana. And spare a thought for stone-broke John Chibadura, charged $5 000 and 30 head of cattle way before the bond-dollar era, or Oliver Mtukudzi, ordered to hunt for his own totem just to appease greedy in-laws.
Of the two collaborations on this album, the Zimpraise-assisted Miteuro is lyrically wobbly and less inspired. But Kana Ndada joins the bottomless trove of Jah Prayzah's love classics. Tamuka puts the sun on pause and gifts the long-distance “lovers” with a steady, jazzy beat to empty their chests and keep things going during lockdown.
While it will be for the audience and the industry to decide impact and durability, we can already pick the album apart for a binding concept, capacity for reinvention, production value, song-writing, social relevance, technical range and emotional relatability. Hokoyo checks almost every box from the songs already discussed.
I have previously written some of the harshest criticism of Jah Prayzah, unimpressed by his easing into an undemanding, bubblegum template. The songs worked for his high-octane, fast-paced performances but were socially distant “music about music.” As Jah Prayzah got more polished, he gave up his original vulnerability and insane penmanship so that by the time he wrote Dangerous, all he had in mind was four more minutes of show time. Whereas, already on his first album, he was capable of emotive and love songs like Taura impassioned traditional ones like Rairai, the production quality just was not there back then. Hokoyo’s clean production and classic lyricism defines the essential Jah Prayzah.
Jah Prayzah is not an obviously political artiste in the prophetic sense of Leonard Zhakata or Winky D. At his most political (2016-2017), he offered conspiracy rather than critique. When Thomas Mapfumo reclaimed the mbira from what historian Mhoze Chikowero calls “mbira-pocalypse” and “Rhodesian epistemicide”, subversion was the game, even before you considered his lyrics. Majaivana’s folk songs are a revolution at the point of revitalisation, before parsing the dense correspondence of the lyrics with the present. That is mbira in the hands of Jah Prayzah, married to his politics of black pride and African renaissance. Hokoyo is a solid album by one of the best African musicians of this generation. Stanley Mushava is a Bulawayobased journalist and music critic. He writes in his personal capacity.