The history of reggae in Zimbabwe echoes far beyond Bob Marley’s historic concert in the earliest days of the country’s independence. Percy Zvomuya crawls the web of influences that makes up not only the sonic cartography of a revolution fuelled by chimurenga music and reggae, but which are the very groundations of today’s Zimdancehall. Sometime […]
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NONE BUT OURSELVES
By Chronic on April 9, 2018 in Arts & Pedagogy, Faith & Ideology, Media & Propaganda, Systems of Governance
THE WAY I SEE IT – National Heroes Acre I
Bongani Kona Who or what haunts you? Do recurrences draw you back in time? Are you nostalgic for lost futures? Does the present seem ghostly? These questions appear in a recent issue of the PEN America journal on the subject of hauntings, a subject I’d like to turn to in this brief reflection, because, lately […]
MURIMI MUNHU
Panashe Chigumadzi travels to the rural Zimbabwe of her ancestors, onto land stolen and cash-cropped by a privileged minority under racist white rule. Now, almost 40 years since independence, millions of hectares have been returned to those whose birthright the soil is. Chigumadzi discovers that the land reform programme that drives agricultural transformation and justice […]
BAHUJANAFRIQUE – A PLAUSIBLE FUTURE
By Chronic on April 9, 2018 in Arts & Pedagogy, Faith & Ideology, Media & Propaganda, Systems of Governance
Sumesh Sharma traces the circuitous roots of Afro-Asiatic history, from the world’s first civilisations in Eygpt to Dravidian civilisations of southern India. Through the exhibition of the work of two radical artists, the Senegalese Issa Samb and the Indian Krishna Reddy, and the writings of the radical philosopher and physicist, Cheikh Anta Diop, he introduces […]
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHIMURENGA AS A COMMUNAL LABORATORY
by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga Since the 1970s, Zimbabweans have used the term “chimurenga” to refer to the 1896-1897 and 1960s-1970s wars of independence against the British settlers, but the concept has a much deeper meaning. First, it refers to the arts of war derived from Murenga – another name for Mwari (God) – hence chiMurenga, […]