An insightful exploration of the role of Zimbabwean liberation music--Chimurenga music--in shaping the history and politics of postcolonial Zimbabwe.The Military Entertainment Complex by Mhoze Chikowero is the story of the making of post-independence Zimbabwe from the sounds and songs born of the country's armed liberation wars, waged against British Rhodesian white settler rule since the 1890s. The war to resist the initial colonization in 1896-1900s, as well as the one waged to reclaim land from the colonial farmers in the 2000s, is known as Chimurenga, and the music it produced is thus called Chimurenga music. The sounds and music were Afrosonic, that is, deeply grounded in the ideology of the 1960s-70s war, spawning the cultural liberation of a people whose self-expression the colonial system had criminalized and oppressed for close to a century. The living labs of the liberation war, Chimurenga, powered not just military, but also cultural rearmament, thereby producing cultural blueprints for a confident, regenerative public consciousness and expressiveness as independence. The title captures the sounds of self-liberation, framing a state of militant audibility in both public cultural expressiveness, public policy propagation, and contestation. It invites readers to imagine, see, hear and feel self-liberation war redeployed as popular entertainment in the service of state making.
Book Details
Publisher: MIT Press
Publish Date: Jul 14th, 2026
Pages: 424
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
EAN: 9780262053310
Categories: • Ethnomusicology• Africa - South - General• Anthropology - Cultural & Social
About the Author
Mhoze Chikowero is Founder-Director of the UCSB Africa Center and a research fellow at Leiden University. His first book African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe won the Kwabena Nketia Book Award.