Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean guitarist, vocalist, and composer, has performed worldwide and released some 50 albums. One of a handful of artists to have a beat named after him, Mtukudzi blends Zimbabwean traditional sounds with South African township music and American gospel and soul, to compose what is known as Tuku Music. In this biography, Jennifer W. Kyker looks at Mtukudzi's life and art, from his encounters with Rhodesian soldiers during the Zimbabwe war of liberation to his friendship with American blues artist Bonnie Raitt. With unprecedented access to Mtukudzi, Kyker breaks down his distinctive performance style using the Shona concept of "hunhu," or human identity through moral relationships, as a framework. By reading Mtukudzi's life in connection with his lyrics and the social milieu in which they were created, Kyker offers an engaging portrait of one of African music's most recognized performers. Interviews with family, friends, and band members make this a penetrating, sensitive, and uplifting biography of one of the world's most popular musicians.
Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean guitarist, vocalist, and composer, has performed worldwide and released some 50 albums. One of a handful of artists to have a beat named after him, Mtukudzi blends Zimbabwean traditional sounds with South African township music and American gospel and soul, to compose what is known as Tuku Music. In this biography, Jennifer W. Kyker looks at Mtukudzi's life and art, from his encounters with Rhodesian soldiers during the Zimbabwe war of liberation to his friendship with American blues artist Bonnie Raitt. With unprecedented access to Mtukudzi, Kyker breaks down his distinctive performance style using the Shona concept of "hunhu," or human identity through moral relationships, as a framework. By reading Mtukudzi's life in connection with his lyrics and the social milieu in which they were created, Kyker offers an engaging portrait of one of African music's most recognized performers. Interviews with family, friends, and band members make this a penetrating, sensitive, and uplifting biography of one of the world's most popular musicians.
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Overview
Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi, a Zimbabwean guitarist, vocalist, and composer, has performed worldwide and released some 50 albums. One of a handful of artists to have a beat named after him, Mtukudzi blends Zimbabwean traditional sounds with South African township music and American gospel and soul, to compose what is known as Tuku Music. In this biography, Jennifer W. Kyker looks at Mtukudzi's life and art, from his encounters with Rhodesian soldiers during the Zimbabwe war of liberation to his friendship with American blues artist Bonnie Raitt. With unprecedented access to Mtukudzi, Kyker breaks down his distinctive performance style using the Shona concept of "hunhu," or human identity through moral relationships, as a framework. By reading Mtukudzi's life in connection with his lyrics and the social milieu in which they were created, Kyker offers an engaging portrait of one of African music's most recognized performers. Interviews with family, friends, and band members make this a penetrating, sensitive, and uplifting biography of one of the world's most popular musicians.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253022387 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | African Expressive Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 295 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Jennifer W. Kyker holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music and the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester.
Read an Excerpt
Oliver Mtukudzi
Living Tuku Music in Zimbabwe
By Jennifer W. Kyker
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Jennifer KykerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02238-7
CHAPTER 1
Hwaro/Foundations
During the height of the dry season, in September 2002, I was invited to attend a postfunerary ceremony at my host family's home in the Chiweshe rural areas, located along the way from Harare to Oliver Mtukudzi's rural home, or musha, in the village of Madziva. Long relieved of their harvest, fields crackled with the parched stubble of maize stalks waiting to be plowed into the soil. Cows grazed at leisure, ambling together in small herds peppered by the brilliant white flecks of cattle egrets. Against a backdrop of bare boughs, a few trees clung to a last scrim of leaves. Low on the horizon, the morning sun was already hot as we awoke the morning after the ceremony. Just out of its reach, small groups of women rested in the shade. Seated on handwoven reed mats, or rukukwe, they gazed out at the modest structures of a rural homestead — a round kitchen with its thatched roof, a few square, brick bedrooms topped by sheets of corrugated asbestos, a crumbling, roofless toilet block, and a grass enclosure for bathing.
Mostly madzisahwira (sg. sahwira), or ritual best friends, these women had spent three days assisting the residents of this compound with the ritual of kurova guva, held roughly a year after the death of a family member to reincorporate his or her spirit into the family's ancestral lineage. After staying awake all night, most people had stolen away for some much-needed repose. Yet these female madzisahwira spontaneously rose again, forming a circle in the middle of the dusty yard. Their long skirts swung out behind them as they began the weaving, counterclockwise movements of mafuwe, a ceremonial genre associated with rainmaking. Clapping their hands to keep time, the women launched into song, their voices settling into a high-pitched, narrow range as the lead singer called out:
Zvemusha uno / What is happening in this home
The others immediately answered her with a unison refrain:
A hiye wohiye rava dembetembe / Reflects a state of disorder
Pausing momentarily, several of the singers interjected exclamations — Hokoyo / Watch out! — as well as frequent ululation, or mhururu, a ritualized expressive form reserved for women.
Soon, a group of men emerged from the house, carrying two drums, or ngoma. Throughout Southern Africa, several different varieties ofngoma share roughly the same construction technique. With cylindrical wooden bodies carved from whole tree trunks, their cow-skin heads, held firmly in place by a series of wooden pegs, can be struck with sticks or hands. From tall, slender instruments played while standing to wide, short drums capable of producing an incredible resonant bass sound, ngoma come in various sizes and can be played singly or in pairs. Depending on region, size, and genre, ngoma are known by an astonishing variety ofnames, even within Zimbabwe: mhito, dandi, mutumba, mhiningo, usindi, and mbete-mbete are but a few.
The staccato timbre of wooden sticks on hide shattered the early morning as the drummers launched into the powerful, syncopated rhythms of mafuwe. Joining them, a hosho player performed a simple pattern on a pair of shakers made of dried gourds filled with canna lily seeds. While he did little more than mark each triplet grouping, the hosho's rich spectrum of frequencies immediately added sonic density and thickness, filling out the musical texture of the performance.
Celebrating the successful completion of kurova guva, the women whiled away the time with this recreational performance of mafuwe. Their position in the yard, a secular space that contrasts with the sacred realm inside the thatched kitchen of the family home, symbolically separated them from the deep work of ritual, now already completed. Yet the women remained preoccupied by themes of kinship, sociality, and moral relations, situated at the very heart of kurova guva. Invoking the moral personhood of hunhu, the lead singer intoned:
Zvemusha uno / What is happening in this home
VekuChihota we / Those from Chihota
Vanga vachiti hakuna hunhu amai / They have been saying, "It lacks
hunhu, mother"
In the performance of these madzisahwira, we see with particular clarity how ngoma enables contemporary Shona speakers to articulate, negotiate, and critique evolving social relationships, transforming experiences of disorder, loss, and disjuncture into the moral relations of hunhu. We also see the madzisahwira's special license to perform social criticism, which is linked to a long-standing Shona institution of ritualized friendship known as husahwira. Together, hunhu, husahwira, and ngoma represent the type of local forms of social organization that anthropologist Claire Ignatowski has described as "rooted in, though not unchanged from, the precolonial past," and which continue to shape the experiences of millions of people throughout Southern Africa.
Hunhu, Husahwira, and Ngoma in Tuku Music
While Oliver Mtukudzi's urban, popular music seems far removed from this rural, ritual setting, the very elements so foundational to this performance of mafuwe — the social ethos of hunhu, the ritualized friendship of husahwira, and the participatory aesthetics of ngoma — are precisely those at the heart of Tuku music. In this chapter, I illustrate how husahwira and ngoma are enmeshed with Mtukudzi's approach to singing hunhu, forming an essential frame of reference in understanding how Zimbabwean audiences have imbued his songs with larger social and political implications. Throughout the chapter, I return frequently to the song "Baba," or "Father" (Shoko, 1993), which offers a representative example of how Mtukudzi has invoked the concepts of husahwira and ngoma in order to craft particularly vivid musical imaginaries of hunhu, enabling him to communicate more effectively with his audiences.
Houses of Stone
Before delving into these themes, I offer a brief overview of the political developments leading to Zimbabwe's emergence as a modern nation-state, in order to situate my discussion of Mtukudzi's music within a larger historical arc. Bounded by the Zambezi River to the north and the Limpopo to the south, the territory now known as Zimbabwe became a British Protectorate in 1891. After a series of uprisings known as the First Chimurenga failed to quash British ambitions, the colony was rechristened Southern Rhodesia in 1898. With a substantial settler population and the sort of extractive economic policies typical of colonialism, Southern Rhodesia was ruled by the British for the next sixty-five years, including a brief period of federation with the neighboring colonies of Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), from 1960 to 1963. Shortly after the federation's collapse, Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith unilaterally proclaimed the colony's independence from Britain in 1965, largely in an attempt to circumvent the British Crown's demand for a transition to majority rule.
Yet Smith's Unilateral Declaration of Independence merely hardened the determination of emerging African nationalist movements. Foremost among them was the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), a predominantly Ndebele organization, and ZANU, a predominantly Shona group. Soon, the struggle for self-governance evolved into a brutal and protracted armed war, which became known as the Second Chimurenga. In a desperate attempt to quell the rising tide of nationalist power, Ian Smith formed a coalition with yet another nationalist movement, the United African National Council, in 1979. The nation was renamed Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and United African National Council leader Bishop Abel Muzorewa was inaugurated as titular prime minister. As nationalist parties were still banned, however, this compromise quickly disintegrated. Finally, a negotiated settlement facilitated by the British government paved the way for majority rule. With ZANU stalwart Robert Mugabe as its newly elected prime minister, Zimbabwe was born on April 18, 1980, making it the last African state to achieve independence with the exception of apartheid South Africa.
Emerging from the ashes of European imperialism, the nation of Zimbabwe, or "Houses of Stone," took its name from the ruins of one of Africa's most impressive precolonial empires, governed by a succession of rulers from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Surrounded by the rolling grasslands and acacia forests of the Southern African savannah, the dynasty's ruined complex of stone buildings, now a national park, lies a few miles southeast of the mid-sized town of Masvingo. Reaching toward the sky, its undulating walls of carefully stacked granite slabs are decorated with chevron and dentate crocodile patterns, as well as low doorways with worn wooden lintels. Set at intervals, stone cairns and monoliths point skyward, the visual embodiment of a vanished power. A tangible manifestation of history, these cool, rough stones have survived the turbulence of centuries. As an emblem of shared political identity, these houses of stone, or dzimba dzemabwe, offered Zimbabwe's new leaders a rich trove of symbolism, and the ruins' iconic conical tower and soapstone birds were quickly incorporated into the nation's new flag, currency, and coat of arms.
Zimbabwe's storied past was accompanied by tangible progress in the decades after independence, with the nation's relatively developed infrastructure and comparatively democratic political structure contributing to gains in food security, education, health, and gender equality. Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, Zimbabwe entered a period of growing political, economic, and social turbulence as it faced the effects of a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, a World Bank Economic Structural Adjustment Program, a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, massive payouts to veterans of the Second Chimurenga, a disastrous land reform program, and the emergence of the Movement for Democratic Change as a formidable opposition party. As a result, Zimbabwe seemed to be edging ever closer to paradigmatic conditions of postcolonial disorder, challenging both residents and outsiders alike to make sense of emerging social, political, and economic realities.
Husahwira
Throughout the trials of the liberation war, the jubilance of independence, and the confusion of the late postcolonial era, Mtukudzi has consistently positioned himself as a counselor and advisor to his listeners, drawing upon the long-standing Shona social institution of ritualized friendship known as husahwira. Calling himself a "sahwira to the nation," Mtukudzi has described the sahwira, or ritual friend, as indispensable in negotiating the moral relations of hunhu: "If I can translate what sahwira is, it's a family friend. A friend that kind of oversees how you are living in your home, and doesn't overtake the family, but is always giving advice. ... he helps us, or coordinates us to discuss." Mtukudzi places special emphasis on the sahwira's social importance in several of his songs, including "Mutorwa" (Mutorwa, 1991), "Kurerutsa Ndima" (Rombe, 1992), and "Jeri," (Gona, 1986).
One of the most important aspects of the sahwira's role is his or her license to speak out in ways that may not otherwise be acceptable. This includes permission to indulge in jokes, insults, and vulgar forms of speech. At one kurova guva ceremony I attended in Mhondoro, for example, a group of female madzisahwira entered a room where several women were resting. Lightheartedly accusing the ceremony's hosts of leaving all the hard labor of cooking and washing dishes to them, the madzisahwira threatened to drag these women outside by their genitals and set them to work. More frequently, the sahwira exercises his or her special dispensation to speak out through relatively open criticism of unethical conduct, particularly on the part of someone in a position of authority. Commenting on the sahwira's ability to mediate domestic disputes by directly confronting a household head, for example, Mtukudzi told me, "He's open, he goes there and says, 'Eh, ah, what? You think you're good?' ... He'll be just shouting at you. But, it's up to you to listen. And you get to know where you're going wrong."
With the liminal position of someone who is not kin, yet is integral to the functioning of kinship networks, the sahwira plays a particularly visible role in rituals of transition, including burials and postfunerary rites such as kurova guva. Almost inevitably, the sahwira's participation at these events includes some form of musical performance, which is intended to enable bereaved family members to carry out the work of repairing a kinship network fractured by death. As Mtukudzi told me:
Mtukudzi: In our culture, in our traditions, that is the purpose of song. You're trying to pass a message. Even at the burial, madzisahwira, they come singing, and acting happy. Because they're trying to neutralize the tension which is there, and the pain which is there. That want that pain to diminish. You, Jennifer, if you lose someone today, if someone passes away, and if I come to you and say, "Oh boo-hoo, you are suffering," what am I doing?
Kyker: I'll cry even harder.
Mtukudzi: Worse! You will be in even worse pain. So, that is not what song was meant for. Song was meant for when you are suffering; song must loosen your pain, so you can be a better person and have a better perspective. To enlighten your mind, because even though you are suffering, it doesn't mean your life is over. You see?
Much like Mtukudzi himself, the sahwira is thus a consummate performer who delivers both emotional support and critical moral guidance through song.
Further extending the performative dimensions of husahwira, the late mbira player Ambuya Beauler Dyoko emphasized that other forms of expressive culture are likewise part of the sahwira's domain. During a funeral, for example, the sahwira may act out short theatrical skits dramatizing the life of the deceased, which often focus on outlandish, comical, or even disgraceful personality traits of the departed family member: "Everyone will be crying. No one will be feeling alright. ... That is when the sahwira comes. Maybe the person was a driver, maybe he drove a taxi, maybe he was even a thief, one of those thieves. They come and act, there inside the house, surrounded by people. The sahwira comes right there, saying, 'You, you, you.' Pretending like he is a pickpocket! At that moment, he is performing." An excellent example of how joking relationships serve to dissolve social tension, the sahwira's performance offers clarity, perspective, and hope during a time of great distress. As Mtukudzi explained:
Instead of me concentrating on the effects of the funeral, the sahwira comes in. Either he's talking something different, or he's disturbing me from thinking too much of the funeral. He eases up my brains; I refresh from what this sahwira is doing. Maybe he portrays what this dead person has been doing when he was alive. Goes there, gets his clothes, puts on the clothes of the deceased. He makes funny out of it, makes a joke out of it, for the main reason to ease up the situation. And you concentrate more, and you find things are a lot easier because of this sahwira.
Singing as a Sahwira
In contemporary settings, the ritual friendship of husahwira has acquired symbolic new dimensions, offering Shona speakers a familiar way of engaging a changing social landscape. In the city, for example, two strangers might address each other as sahwira in order to create an immediate bond, symbolically linking themselves together through the mutual rights and responsibilities inherent in this form of ritualized friendship. The invocation of husahwira between strangers is a way of intimating that the reciprocal moral obligations of hunhu are possible not only among kin, but also among more extended social contacts, a necessity in the context of urbanization and proletarianization. By positioning himself as a "sahwira to the nation," Mtukudzi has similarly sought to establish this type ofbond with his audiences, thereby drawing listeners more firmly into the social imaginaries of his songs.
Much as the family sahwira is called upon in times of conflict or distress, Mtukudzi sees particular value in singing about difficult topics. As he told me, "That's the role of an artist. ... To talk about where we are going wrong, what we can't say, what we have to do, what we can't do. It's about reminders — what the nation, or the family, is neglecting, or don't realize they are doing. It's up to the artist to identify that thing and talk about it. Just like a sahwira." As a song that speaks out against domestic violence, "Baba" illustrates precisely the type of situation where the sahwira, as a trusted family advisor, is well-positioned to intervene. As Mtukudzi explained:
The father is supposed to be the head of the family, and he could be going wrong somewhere. And the wife and the children can't really confront him ... you can't just go direct and say, "Hey dad, no, I can't do that." Or as a wife, you can't say, "Hey, I can't do that." It needs a sahwira now to come in. 'Cause probably the sahwira is a friend to your dad. ... So he'll go there and say, "Ah, ishe, [king, or Lord], can't you see what you're doing to your wife is bad, man! You!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Oliver Mtukudzi by Jennifer W. Kyker. Copyright © 2016 Jennifer Kyker. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Art of Determination
1. Hwaro/Foundations
2. Performing the Nation's History
3. Singing Hunhu after Independence
4. Neria: Singing the Politics of Inheritance
5. Return to Dande
6. Listening as Politics
7. What Shall We Do?: Music, Dialogue, and HIV/AIDS
8. Listening in the Wilderness
Conclusion: I Have Finished My Portion of the Field
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"This is an excellent expanded professional biography of Oliver Mtukudzi, the famous Zimbabwean popular band leader, composer, and troubadour. Jennifer W. Kyker has dedicated many months of tireless on-site research in Zimbabwe and internationally to provide this kind of loving detail. The results of such a wealth of interviews and interactions with a range of participants in Mtukuzdi's career as well as Mtukudzi himself are richly evident not only in the main text but in the 'dialogue boxes' of selections from interviews and other materials thoughtfully provided at the end, along with several appendices and a photo gallery."
Artfully crafted, this volume transverses key moments in recent Zimbabwean history heard through the author's sophisticated discussion of specific Mtukudzi songs as well as through the deep and varied reactions of listeners to those songs. Like the best ethnomusicology, the book clearly and forcefully demonstrates the real, tangible importance of popular music in social life.
Artfully crafted, this volume transverses key moments in recent Zimbabwean history heard through the author's sophisticated discussion of specific Mtukudzi songs as well as through the deep and varied reactions of listeners to those songs. Like the best ethnomusicology, the book clearly and forcefully demonstrates the real, tangible importance of popular music in social life.
This is an excellent expanded professional biography of Oliver Mtukudzi, the famous Zimbabwean popular band leader, composer, and troubadour. Jennifer W. Kyker has dedicated many months of tireless on-site research in Zimbabwe and internationally to provide this kind of loving detail. The results of such a wealth of interviews and interactions with a range of participants in Mtukuzdi's career as well as Mtukudzi himself are richly evident not only in the main text but in the 'dialogue boxes' of selections from interviews and other materials thoughtfully provided at the end, along with several appendices and a photo gallery.
Informed by two decades of intimate engagement with Zimbabwean music and religion, Kyker's study offers the first sustained examination of Oliver Mtukudzi's oeuvre, and reveals the rich political literacies at work in local and diasporic practices of listening. Kyker illumines how audiences and performers collaborate to make meaning. Along with exemplary analyses of his musical idiom, this work shows how, like deep Shona proverbs, Tuku's lyrics are frequently transplanted into varying contemporary commentaries. Innovative, meticulous, and exquisitely attentive to historical context, this study will be a must-read for the fields of ethnomusicology, African languages, and new African diaspora studies.
"Artfully crafted, this volume transverses key moments in recent Zimbabwean history heard through the author's sophisticated discussion of specific Mtukudzi songs as well as through the deep and varied reactions of listeners to those songs. Like the best ethnomusicology, the book clearly and forcefully demonstrates the real, tangible importance of popular music in social life."
This is an excellent expanded professional biography of Oliver Mtukudzi, the famous Zimbabwean popular band leader, composer, and troubadour. Jennifer W. Kyker has dedicated many months of tireless on-site research in Zimbabwe and internationally to provide this kind of loving detail. The results of such a wealth of interviews and interactions with a range of participants in Mtukuzdi's career as well as Mtukudzi himself are richly evident not only in the main text but in the 'dialogue boxes' of selections from interviews and other materials thoughtfully provided at the end, along with several appendices and a photo gallery.
Informed by two decades of intimate engagement with Zimbabwean music and religion, Kyker's study offers the first sustained examination of Oliver Mtukudzi's oeuvre, and reveals the rich political literacies at work in local and diasporic practices of listening. Kyker illumines how audiences and performers collaborate to make meaning. Along with exemplary analyses of his musical idiom, this work shows how, like deep Shona proverbs, Tuku's lyrics are frequently transplanted into varying contemporary commentaries. Innovative, meticulous, and exquisitely attentive to historical context, this study will be a must-read for the fields of ethnomusicology, African languages, and new African diaspora studies.
Jennifer Kyker offers a vivid, insightful account of Oliver Mtukudzi, whose big voice and heartfelt songs make him a living legend of Afropop. Mtukudzi's commitment to fostering positive social relations emerges with clarity and passion in her writing, which bears witness to how Mtukudzi's music has both shaped and been shaped by Zimbabwean history, politics, and society.