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Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited's "Chamunorwa" ("What are we fighting for?"), from their 1991 album of the same name, has remained one of my favorite tracks to revisit since I first heard it ~15 years ago.

This track (and the entire album) is incredible. As one 1991 Chicago Tribune review[1] put it:

...even those unfamiliar with the sound will find themselves seduced by the snaky guitar and mbira lines, complex net of percussion, bursts of horns and, driving everything, the distinctive rolling rhythms of Zimbabwean music.

Listen below:

However, Mapfumo's music is more than just pretty-sounding. It is also powerful revolutionary art. Born in 1945 in then-Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Thomas Mapfumo's music is strongly political, part of the chimurenga tradition that struggled and resisted against white supremacist Rhodesia as well as the later

Rhodesia was a former British-colonial state founded on upholding and furthering white supremacy, and Mapfumo's music is part of the chimurenga tradition

In a 2018 New Yorker article, Anakwa Dwamena explains:

...chimurenga music continues to be “one platform that Zimbabweans always resort to whenever they want to express their grievances against their leaders and against Western imperialism.” The word comes from the name of Murenga, an early ancestor and warrior of the Shona people. In Zimbabwe’s liberation war, of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the military wings of guerrillas based in Mozambique and Zambia set up choirs to sing chimurenga songs that derived from folk hymns and other folk songs. These hymns connected the living with the world of the ancestors and recorded the struggle for those to come. Revolutionaries played these songs at rallies held in urban areas and at all-night vigils called mapungwes, where guerrillas and peasants would come together to sing.

Songs like “Muka, Muka!” (“Wake Up, Wake Up!”) and “Tumira Vana Kuhondo” (“Mothers Send Your Children to War”) were sung to politicize and educate Zimbabweans about why the war for independence was being fought.

[2]

One of Mapfumo's early songs, Hokoyo ("Watch out!"), by Thomas Mapfumo & the Acid Band, led to him being jailed[2] by the apartheid Rhodesian government.

Dwamena continues:

In the first half-decade after Zimbabwe won its independence, Mapfumo, like other chimurenga musicians, would sing songs like “Mabasa” (“Let’s Get Back to Work”), about the need for unity in order to build the new nation. But, as the eighties turned to the nineties, the tone of his music changed. In 1988, his song “Corruption” brought to the national airwaves the whispered frustrations heard in private offices, marketplaces, and homes about the unequal distribution of the nation’s wealth.

[2]

I hope you enjoy listening "Chamunorwa" and the rest of Mapfumo's excellent music!!

Works Cited

  1. Review of Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited - Chamunorwa by Chris Heim (1991)
  2. Interview with African music expert Banning Eyre about the early years of Thomas Mapfumo's career (2015)
  3. Zimbabwe’s Powerful Music of Struggle by Anakwa Dwamena (2018)

Further Reading/Listening

  1. Wikipedia page for Thomas Mapfumo
  2. Playing with Fire: Fear and Self-Censorship in Zimbabwean Music by Banning Eyre (2001)
  3. Thomas Mapfumo & The Blacks Unlimited - Gwindingwi Rine Shumba (1980)

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