While reading for the third time Tsitisi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Condition, which was published in 1988 and is set in in the 60s in the region of Manicaland, Zimbabwe, home of my tribe the Chimanicas, I came across this wonderful passage: “An enterprising owner of one of the tuckshops…introduced a gramophone into his shop so that the youth could entertain themselves with music and dancing. They played the new rhumba that, as popular music will, pointed unsystematic fingers at the conditions of the times: ‘I’ll beat you if you keep asking for your money,’ ‘Father, I’m jobless, give me money for roora,’ [roora is money paid for a bride] ‘My love, why have you taken a second wife?’ There was swaying hips, stamping of feet, to the pulse of these social facts.” The first two of the three samples of afro-pop need no explanation. The third (“a second wife”) concerns the modernization process, the crumbling of an older, African order and the emergence of a new, Christian-based one. The passage from Nervous Condition is important not only because I’m related to its author (we share the same totem) but also because it shows how any historical study of late-20th century African culture is useless or incomplete with the exclusion of its popular music. This is not true for all cultures; some require only written materials for the reconstruction of a given time. With Africans, particularly from the southern nations, you must listen to the music.
The same is also true for post-independence Jamaicans, whose history is nowhere else but in popular music—listen to Horace Andy’s ‘National Heroes’ or Johnny Clarke’s “Declaration of Human Rights.” Another excellent example is this sad song by the great Gregory Isaacs (the Lonely Lover) “Front Door”: “I gave her back the key to her front door/ because it seemed she didn’t care about me any more/I gave her all the love I had and she spilled it/So I packed my things into a shopping bag and decided to quit.” The opening of “Front Door” contains two significant “social facts”: one, the the singer survives in a capitalist economy (shopping bag); two, extreme poverty determines the singer’s reality (he can fit all of his belongings into a shopping bag).
I want to say more on this subject, as there are more examples from Zimbabwean and Jamaican pop, but I fear it’s not a very interesting topic for most of you.