Roger, Over? A tribute to Cde Chinx

nostalgically recalled in an interview in 2006: “I taught the choir the song during mapungwe and we kept polishing it, hitting it until people went crazy; we then sent it over to Maputo, where every one of my compositions was requested for recording and radio play. And man, what recruitment that song inspired!”

Songs like “Maruza Vapambepfumi” and “Ndiro Gidi” resonated powerfully with Africans both at the war’s front and those listening to the guerrilla radio at home. They critiqued and put into historical perspective the African predicament as rooted in the original sins of Rhodesia: the “plunder, greed and mendacity” of the settlers that Rhodesian history books extolled as courage, self-sacrifice, and patriotism (Pongweni 1997, 69).

African song traditions are inclusive and participatory. Any member of the musical community can participate in the familiar styles of call and response, the yodelling, makwa clapping and dance refrains, thereby moulding the song narrative in the performative dariro.

Thus, Cde Mhere, who assembled the Takawira Choir with Chinx, added a short preface to the nine-minute song.

He felt that the song’s plot omitted a crucial aspect of the popular understanding of the advent of colonialism and African resistance — Chaminuka’s prophecy.

Chaminuka is believed to have thus prophesied the invasion of the land before he was captured and murdered by the Ndebele in the 19th Century. So, Cde Chinx told me, Cde Mhere sang,

Paivapo nemumwe murume There was once a man Zita rake Chaminuka His name Chaminuka Waigara muChitungwiza Who lived in Chitungwiza Munyika yedu yeZimbabwe In our country Zimbabwe Wakataura achiti He foretold that Kuchauya vamwe vanhu There shall come a people Vachange vasina mabvi with no knees Munyika yedu yeZimbabwe. Into our country Zimbabwe.

Chinx started singing Chimurenga songs as a local mujibha during mapungwe before crossing into Mozambique. He recalled, “I started as a mujibha, right in the mountains of eastern Zimbabwe.

“I was singing right there . . . when we went to open new bases, raising morari. Such songs as ‘Sendekera’ (Keep pushing; composed by David Kabhachi), I would sing them and keep on embellishing them with my own words, depicting what I would be seeing wherever I patrolled. People liked that so much.”

In Mozambique, Chinx’s fame solidified with “Rusununguko MuZimbabwe” (Freedom in Zimbabwe), a composition that used the tune of a Christian hymn, now re-purposed to predict the coming not of Jesus but of African freedom sooner rather than later.

“I was taking those gospel tunes which I used to sing in church with my mother, emptying them of all the words about (the Christian) God and filling them with Chimurenga words.”

In this way, the guerrillas domesticated and redeployed the pervasive and often insidious Christian hymn. ◆ Excerpt from Mhoze Chikowero’s book “African Music, Power and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe”, published by Indiana University Press, Bloomington, on November 2015. The book won the Kwabena Nketia Book Award for the best book on African music scholarship for the years 2013-2016. Its copies are available at the Mbira Centre, Glenara Avenue North, Highlands, Harare. Professor Chikowero is the director of research at the Mbira Institute and Associate Professor of African History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He can be contacted at Chikowero@ history.ucsb.edu.