Books

Add captionBook: Black Prophetic FireAuthor: Cornel West Publisher: Beacon PressISBN: 978-0-870-0352-7Dancehall sing-jay Bugle plays back a thumbnail sequence of Pan-Africanist father-figures, tagging in the first black U.S president Barack Obama as the high point of the freedom train. “The Journey” video by Bugle is an example of the excitement occasioned by Obama’s ascendancy, and the ripple factor in popular entertainment and other spheres of black culture. For our part, we entered inter-school essay competitions revolving around the idea that a black president in the White House was the happily-ever-after of Pan-Africanist strivings. Obama’s rubber-stamping of drone warfare, bankrolling of terror to destabilise nations in the imperial warpath, failure to upgrade the living conditions o...

Higher Education Minister Prof Jonathan Moyo If universities remain mills of qualifications to get jobs, instead of capacitation to grow jobs, unemployment will remain a stubborn hurdle for Zimbabwean youths. An estimated 10, 000 university students graduating from Zimbabwe’s 13 universities every year are up against an austere patch in the job market. Universities have become the conventional route to employment, given Zimbabwe’s high literacy rate, but for many graduates, the hard road does not end in the formal sector. Zimstat defines a potential workforce of 7.8 million people out of a population of 13.4 million Zimbabweans. A vast majority, 94.5 percent, of the 6.3 million Zimbabweans defined as employed work in the informal sector. “The largest number (4.16m) is made up of smallhol...

Add captionBook: The Bright Continent Author: Dayo Olopade Publisher: Houghton MifflinISBN: 978-0-547-67831-3The United Nations (UN) solicits European entries for a poster design competition to mark the tenth anniversary of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The winning entry by Stefan Einarsson from Iceland merges barefooted African children, apparently queuing for food at a refugee camp, with medium shots of G8 (EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, UK and US) leaders. The caption “Dear world leaders, we are still waiting,” runs across the digitally manipulated image, juxtaposing power and poverty. This 2010 image epitomises Western media echo chambers, development agencies and capitalist institutions’ framing of Africa as a helpless continent, “the white man’s burd...

Bulawayo herds (Chronicle)Hardy cattle herds have long been the indigenous bank for Lupane’s smallholder ranchers. More than 100, 000 cattle provide the lifeline for most families in the semi-arid and drought-prone district of Matabeleland North. However, the ranchers hardly ever withdraw from their “indigenous accounts,” seldom selling or slaying their beasts, rather taking pride in growing their herds. This has lately proven costly as a series of dry spells and diseases are decimating the cattle and forcing them up for sale at a pittance. Against this background, Lupane ranchers have moved to take production to a commercial, and maximise profitability, by rehabilitating obsolete deep tanks, feed lots and boreholes. A new sale pen where Bulawayo abattoirs fortnightly outbid each other for...

Sizzla KalonchiWhen the Apollo mission landed the first crew on the moon in 1969, founding Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere was not among the cheering spectators.“While they were trying to reach the moon, we were trying to reach the village,” the statesman is reported to have said.There have been different readings of Nyerere’s statement on the first league of moonwalkers, but one thing remains straightforward: all worthwhile progress is human-centered. The reggae equivalent of the Nyerere diss is perhaps Sizzla’s “Hungry Children.” The belligerent sing-jay challenges Babylon: “You are destroying Earth, yet you still want to go Mars.” Without taking anything away from the astronauts, as I am also overwhelmed by the phenomenal facility of space travel in flashing new light into the univer...

Add captionBook: Lion Songs Author: Banning EyrePublisher: Duke University Press (2015)ISBN: 978-0-8223-5908-1Zimbabwe is in birth pangs. Decolonisation is at high tide but the black majority has no culture industry equal to the war effort. Township culture is a cosmopolitan blend. Western covers, moody jazz numbers and spiritually bankrupt pop revolving around instant pleasure and purposelessness, define the music industry of the day.In 1972, a gangly Mbare artist earning his bread in the copper town of Mhangura breaks away from Western covers, infuses mbira strains into his repertoire and a whole new movement is born.In the years leading up to Independence, Thomas Mapfumo presses politically charged ditties to vinyl, guitar riffs aping mbira mysticism, and the black majority sways along....

The Protestant Reformers (Photo: BBC)A series of bizzare rites, commonly legitimated as miracles, has been trending in the Christian fold. Within the same space, preachers have taken consumerism to scale, enhancing everyday products with “anointing” and selling them in church with effortless success. In the latest instances, “value-added” commodities, including anointed pens to nail the exam and anointed condoms for a more vigilant firewall, have been sold out in churches over the recent weeks. On the other hand, bizarre rites, all in a year’s work, border more on manipulation than merchandise.These include a pastor walking on congregants, directing followers to eat grass, eating snakes, killing congregants to resurrect them, and ministering sex-based deliverance.While a definitive scriptu...

Superstar Oliver MtukudziZimbabwe’s highly regarded recording artist Oliver Mtukudzi established Pakare Paye Arts Centre in 2003, partly in response to the underestimation of the expressive arts in the country’s education system.  His biographer, Shepherd Mutamba, gives insight on the superstar’s educational philosophy in the book, “Tuku Backstage.” Mtukudzi protests that instead of nurturing what students inherently possess, the education system has a predetermined emphasis on certain disciplines at the expense of the expressive arts. “If the arts, or music specifically, is organised, it has the potential to turn an ordinary child into an extraordinary person. Tuku is a perfect example,” Mutamba points out. “What Zimbabwe’s education and the community social sector has failed to do for le...

Fay Chung's Zimbabwe Looking East A climate of economic indeterminacy outlined Zimbabwe at the inception of the unity government in 2009. Coalition partners ideologically oscillated between the polar extremes of the modern world – the East represented by China, and the West represented by Europe and the US. With Zanu-PF’s decisive electoral victory in 2013, the Look East policy was once again foregrounded on the party’s roadmap to economic recovery.The policy looks even more pertinent at a time when China’s global ascendancy concurs with the marked decline of the post-2008 Western capitalist establishment. However, Zimbabwe’s former Minister of State for Employment Creation, Fay Chung, is waving down a flag for the country to pause and calculate what is there for it in the East.C...

Lt Stitchie When Jesus dispatched messengers with the good news, some went to synagogues, others went to marketplace and others to the debate square.Sasha, Papa San, Lieutenant Stitchie and Chevelle Franklyn went beyond the pulpit, to the dancehall.Dancehall music is one of the mediums Christians artistes, most of them blazing chart-toppers and award-winners during their secular tenure, have deployed to propagate the Gospel.Zimbabwean artistes are yet to catch the fire in the main, with the only major proponent of the genre, Culture T, now deceased.The re-conceptualisation of Christian music has not been without controversy, considering the negative baggage associated with Dancehall.Gospel Reggae, as the re-flowed genre is known, along with other pop renditions such as Christian Ra...