Thomas Turino is a professor of musicology and anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After conducting extensive field work in Zimbabwe during the 1990s, he published “Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe” (University of Chicago Press, 2000). A complex work examining the role of music in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle and establishment of statehood, Turino’s book provides an excellent account of the social, political, and historical circumstances in which Thomas Mapfumo rose as a composer, singer, and bandleader. In October, 2005, Banning Eyre sat down to talk with Turino for the Afropop Worldwide program “Thomas Mapfumo: The War Years.” Here’s their conversation. Banning Eyre: How did you first get interested in Zimbabwe?  Paul’s book was very influential in the process of bringing the mbira into what has become a cosmopolitan canon of world music traditions, traditions any world music fan should know or any world music textbook should include, just as European music history texts must include Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and the other figures of that canon. But actually, Zimbabwe has many types of musical traditions, probably the dance-drumming and choral being most common, but it was really the mbira that caught the international imagination. I think that its sound and music produced a good fit with cosmopolitan aesthetics. It had a familiar aspect to it, a sweet aspect that fit our aesthetics, and yet at the same time, it was distinctive. So this mbira-centric view of Zimbabwean music influenced the reception and conception of Thomas Mapfumo in world music circles outside Zimbabwe after the mid-1980s. B.E: You use the word cosmopolitan in a particular way. Can you define it? 
B.E: Why don’t you give us a kind of social/historical snapshot of Rhodesia in 1970—say, in the 60s leading up to 1970? What's interesting to me is that in Shona, for instance, there was no word for "nation." It wasn't a local conception. It was a conception that Zimbabweans learned through North American and European missionary education. The African middle class also internalized European and North American aesthetics in terms of clothing styles, music and dance styles, styles of weddings, and culinary styles—all the things that we think about as being part of culture. In the first phase of this process, in a colonial situation, like in Zimbabwe, the people are imitating a model that's coming from somewhere else. And here again, the vehicle is this mission education. What's important to me is the people who grew up, say, on mission station land, which is really separated from the indigenous sections of the country that were still thriving time. It was not that that a cosmopolitan culture took over the indigenous one. But people who grew up on mission station lands, who grew up in middle class households, start to be socialized in a different way, and they start to be socialized with these ideas that come from elsewhere.  But here's the key thing. These new cultural elements become localized in these people's life experiences, so that when they pray to Jesus, or they go ballroom dancing, it is no longer that they are imitating Europeans. At this point, they are really doing something that is coming out of their own cultural background, although in Zimbabwe, it was a minority cultural background. This is what I think of as a cosmopolitan moment, when the cosmopolitan formation really starts to form a particular place. It is through the internal generation of those practices that are done in London, that are done in New York, nowadays in Tokyo—but now, in Harare they're being done, by people who grew up in households where these were common practices. That's what I think of as the process of creating a cosmopolitan cultural formation. B.E: So what was foreign for their parents or grandparents is no longer foreign to them.  So the other aspect of cosmopolitanism for me is that while you're sharing ideas like automobiles, money, that you should save money, that certain kinds of education are good—all these values that we think of as normal in middle class America—those values get spread their through colonialism, but then they take root within a particular cultural group and they are localized. But at the same time, cosmopolitanism always coexists with unique aspects from the area in question. So an African cosmopolitan might still believe in witchcraft, for instance. B.E: Yes, I noticed that in West Africa, in Mali. But there, I always had the sense that people had a stronger sense of history than did people in Zimbabwe. Malians seem more protected from absorbing foreign culture because they have a stronger sense of history.  But let me say this. I think this is important. We get these images that once westernization takes hold a certain place, then it sweeps the whole place, and once colonialism started in Zimbabwe, then all indigenous traditions go by the wayside. That is not the case. What I'm trying to describe for Zimbabwe is that the emergence of this small middle class that has cosmopolitan ways, that can speak to people in New York in London on the same terms because their part of the same formation. However, simultaneously in time, throughout the colonial period and to the present day, there are other cultural formations in Zimbabwe, which I’ll just call for the sake of ease, indigenous cultural formations. The belief system is different. The practices are different. The musical aesthetics, I would argue, are radically different. And these things exist in parallel. In other words, there is a kind of macro historical narrative that said, "Colonialism rubbed out indigenous Shona music and dance, and it was replaced by modern jazz and other cosmopolitan styles." I don't agree with that view. I think that the indigenous music making was powerful throughout the colonial period. It remains powerful today. It's just in another cultural formation. It's in other places. It's in what were called the Tribal Trust Lands earlier on, in rural areas, and in the working-class townships. There are still a lot of monolingual Shona speakers in the working-class townships today. There are some people in those places, in fact a fair amount of people, that are part of a deifferent cultural formation. There is interchange between people certainly, but I would say that they make decisions differently. One of my acid tests for thinking about cultural formations is how you make decisions. What is your basis? Is it about capital accumulation? Or is it about what the ancestors might say about a particular action? Those are two very different bases for making a decision. And those would be the kind of indicators that I would use to think about whether somebody was really in the cosmopolitan formation in Zimbabwe, or largely in an indigenous formation.  Everybody thinks of history as this neat linear phenomenon. There's just one line of history, so when this stuff is coming in, the other stuff has to go out. People think that way, and it's just not the case. You've got lots of tracks, but it's the middle class track the gets reported on, because that’s who the cosmopolitans are interested in. So all this other stuff is going on, but nobody's paying attention to it. That's how culture works. The cosmopolitan loop. There's also ethnomusicological loops. The ethnomusicologist shows up and all the professional informants come out of the woodwork and talk to you, because they are you been trained by earlier scholars what to do. I was talking about how the African middle class internalizes the social style and cultural style, and then starts to produce its own version of it. I want to always argue that it is this particular pocket, this middle class pocket, who become really prominent, because they're the ones who ultimately take over the government and the institutions. They are the ones who are found in print, who get to go to conferences in London and so on. But there's this other, vibrant cultural formation going on in the villages that doesn't get the same amount of attention, precisely because they're not cosmopolitan. They don't talk the talk, walk the walk, and they're not as available to people in the cosmopolitan formation. 
B.E: Okay, but when we talk about traditional music in Zimbabwe, there is a pervasive idea that the Rhodesians discouraged it. To some extent, where mbira is concerned, there is something to this, especially in terms of missionary activity. Wouldn’t you agree? Let's take the colonial government, for instance. The government controlled radio actually went out of their way in the post-World War II era to record all types of indigenous dance drumming, choral music, popular music, mbira music, to be aired on the African Service radio programs. Why did they do this? Out of love for indigenous music? Probably not. They wanted to keep listeners tuned in to the government controlled radio so they wouldn't tune in to radio Moscow or something. But the effect of this was to actually archive this stuff. These recordings are still in the Zimbabwean archive today. And it did something else too. I mentioned earlier that there were all these different, regional, indigenous groups. All these traditions were links to a particular area and to a particular group. When the radio picks them up and begins to air them widely, they begin to cross those regional boundaries, and people begin to know traditions from other regions. And in a funny way, they helped promote the same process that nationalists themselves were trying to promote, which is to break down regional and so-called tribal barriers, to get Zimbabweans to think of themselves as one group. Well, the radio had an impact in that. So to say that the colonial government tried to squash these things is inaccurate. They held festivals. They recorded and aired this stuff on the radio. 
B.E: Perhaps those claims apply more to an earlier period. These radio broadcasts come later on in the Rhodesian history, right? B.E: So it doesn't mean that the stories we hear about in mbiras being taken away, and children being humiliated are not true. It's just that there are other stories too. But don’t you think that the Shona, decentralized, and weakened at the time Rhodes arrived, were especially vulnerable to acculturation?  There are spirits which are much further back, clan spirits, mhondoro spirits. But a lot of the action, a lot of the energy in terms of ceremonies for the ancestors, is one’s own family ancestors that go back through generations and generations. So it's the closeness. These ancestors are family members, and they care about us in the present, and they're watching out for us in the present. So with that kind of attitude, it's more intimate, more face-to-face. B.E: But it also means that the ancestors who people are communicating with are all tied up with the colonial history, because that's the history they grew up with. This is what I mean what I say that the colonial history looms so much larger in Zimbabwe than in, say, Mali. 
B.E: Let’s come back to music. You write about the indigenous music going on in the urban townships. Talk about that. Okay, so the kids coming out of these choirs read music. They have developed this taste for very clearly arranged music, lots of nice contrasts, European harmonies, and so on and so forth. They begin to create their own traditions. They moved to Harare to try to get clerk jobs, or other jobs that are open to the black middle class, and they start to create their own groups, and they model these groups on African-American groups, like the Mills Brothers, or the Ink Spots, or different jazz groups. There were also groups from South Africa that served as models for these Zimbabweans. And so they started creating their own vocal quartets, quintets, backed by jazz band instrumentation. And jazz musicians were coming out of the military bands, which is standard practice in Africa in general. You have instrumentalists playing horns, often learned in military bands, or police bands.  One popular group beginning in the 1940s, and all the way through the beginning of the 1960s, was a group called the Black Evening Follies, and they spelled their name “De Black Evening Follies,” almost an imitation of dialect, coming out of the minstrel tradition in the United States. They performed at situations that were polite, middle class, sit-down concerts in recreation halls in the urban townships, for middle-class audiences. And one of the things that people always told me is these concerts were so quiet you could hear a pin drop. All the attention was on the performers on the stage. They were so polite that you could take your mother-in-law, which is the acid test in Zimbabwe to respectability. So they would have these concerts in the recreation halls on weekends, and they were variety shows, and they would do all the cosmopolitan styles of the day. In this one group, the Black Evening Follies, they kept up the cosmopolitan styles. For a lot of their tunes, they would come out on stage with carefully, politely choreographed dance, and sing Mills Brothers song very much in that style. As time goes on, as rock-and-roll hits the world in the late 1950s the Black Evening Follies was one of the first groups to play rock-and-roll. Say, around 1958 to 1962, you could have heard in the same Black Evening Follies concert a Mills Brothers tune and a song imitating Little Richard or Elvis Presley. Sophistication and smoothness were important aspects of performance for the black middle class in Zimbabwe, because that was part of their sense of who they were. Again, I'm arguing that this is not simply an imitation, but that they were part of the same formation that valued a tightly organized, sophisticated sound. These were now their own values. It's what they learned in school, so they would reproduce those things.  When Thomas Mapfumo began learning cosmopolitan musical styles as a teenager, he could have obviously turned to recordings, and the radio, and hear these recordings from afar, but what's interesting to me is he also had local models. There were a number of different groups, Black Evening Follies, they Cool Fours, Epworth Theatrical Strutters, who were playing cosmopolitan music. These groups start performing jazz, and later rock-and-roll, in the townships, so that young Zimbabwe's could go to these concerts in the city and hear local performers doing rock-and-roll. This is again this notion of cosmopolitanism. It had formed its own roots in this place method formed its own roots in this place, and there were local models. Young Zimbabweans could learn from older Zimbabweans, these traditions, not as foreign things, but as local. B.E: That’s very interesting.  So again, I'm coming back to this notion of these multiple cultural formations with very little crossover. What's also interesting, in terms of this larger story that colonialism was crushing indigenous musical practices, is that during the late 1950s, the first attention on the part of the black middle class to indigenous musical practices does not come from the nationalists. But in fact, it comes from a group of white liberals, and white foreigners, who in the post-World War II era had become interested in indigenous African music. All of a sudden, the writers in African Parade started taking an interest in African music. For instance, one writer notes that when a Zimbabwean jazz group goes to London, nobody is very interested. But when a Zimbabwean group goes to London and performs indigenous music, that's what the Londoners are interested in. And so that idea takes root in Zimbabwe. Among the urban, middle class, all of a sudden, indigenous music starts to become chic. Now this is during the Federation years, late 1950s, early 1960s. There was a liberal mood among certain whites, and the idea that the discourse of “racial partnership" was pervasive at that time. But it is a partnership with the black, cosmopolitan, middle class. They were the ones in touch with that whole discourse and the possible benefits of it. So this creates a sense of real frustration when in fact the black middle class gradually realizes that political partnership and economic mobility is not going to be a possibility. So in the second half of the 1950s, mass nationalist really begins to take off.  Incipient nationalist parties, and then major nationalist parties like ZAPU, and in the early 1960s, ZANU, emerge at this time. Now what's also interesting is that there was no unified Zimbabwean nation. There wasn't even the word "nation" in Shona. This was a cosmopolitan concept, so of course the leadership that had this concept were cosmopolitan. That's what they learned in Mission school or in higher education abroad. B.E: So how did the nationalists use music in service of their cause?  The image created from these rallies was very, very purposeful. They chose the indigenous traditions, Jerusarema dance drumming, muchongoyo dance drumming, mbakumba dance drumming, mbira performance, as emblems of the uniquely Zimbabwen. But at the same time, they would put them on stage juxtaposed with these "modern” acts. This was even written up in headlines, that the intention was to create a blend of the new and the old--uniquely Zimbabwean, yet modern, and on the same footing with other nation states in the world. And this particular image begins to be created, and seen by many, many, many urban dwellers in Zimbabwe in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And this in my opinion is the beginning of mass nationalism, and also, a second bit of fuel behind this idea that indigenous music is good, and it's even better when it’s blended with these cosmopolitan aspects. It was precisely this blend that Thomas Mapfumo hit on in the development of his mature style beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By playing indigenous dance-druming and mbira music in an electric guitar band format, Mapfumo, and the many others that did this type of thing in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, were right in step with the mood and taste of audiences.  I would argue that this kind of change of mood and change in taste among the Zimbabwe urban musical public has these two roots: One, the white liberals of the Federation period who were looking to the uniqueness of African music, and Two, the nationalists. And these two groups, white liberals and nationalists, in fact were closely united during the late fifties Federation period. So it was these conditions that created an audience that was receptive to the style that Thomas would make famous. Interestingly, it was also this blend of the distinctively Zimbabwean with cosmopolitan musical features that would make Mapfumo’s music appealing to world music fans after he started touring internationally—it was both exotic and familiar at the same time, exactly the combination world music fans would respond to in the 1980s and 1990s. B.E: In your book, you talk about how Thomas was to some extent guided by his audience.  One of the things that I was struck by when I worked in Zimbabwe was that there were a lot of electric band's doing indigenous genres, and the more conservative indigenous musicians often rejected these efforts. But they always said to me, "Thomas got it right. He was the one person who could really do the indigenous music in this band formats and get it right.” And I believe it he was able to be so creative, and produce such beautiful music because he himself had internalized these two aesthetics fully, and in him, they were combined in a unique way, and that's what we get with his music. B.E: Talk about some of the musical developments that lead up to the emergence of Thomas’s mature sound.  Some had actually been mbira players, or played other Shona instruments of that type. And they would just adapt that music that they already knew, and the indigenous singing style that they knew, to the acoustic guitar. So that was one-man, for instance, John Nkomo, who played acoustic guitar with a bottleneck, or slide, like Delta blues players would in United States. But he played mbira music. There's a particular piece that he recorded with the radio station, a guitar version of “Karigamombe.” So in this case, what we have is a musician taking a new technology, and basically just adapting it to indigenous musical practices and aesthetics. You have that kind of example in Mali, certainly, among the Mande. Well, it happened in Zimbabwe, and it happened in lots of places, including South Africa, were bow music was transferred to the guitar. In the 1960s, something starts to happen in urban Zimbabwe. A distinctive youth culture begins to grow up, based on sort of teen culture in the cosmopolitan formation, in United States, in England, in France, and so on. And so rock-and-roll, and television shows like Teen Time start to happen. Stories of the Beatles’ wealth, the Rolling Stones’ wealth start to influence people in Zimbabwe. Concert groups, like the Black Evening Follies, all had middle class day jobs. This was art for art’s sake. They never had the idea of making a living playing music, or most of them did not. In fact what they told me is that when they made money, they either put it back into costumes and so forth, or they would donate it to charity. Another feature that came with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones was the notion that the singer-songwriter, performers who write their own music. This was part of the rock-and-roll idea. So by the mid-to late 1960s, you start to see this valuing of musical originality. Also around this time, a change in liquor laws meant there was more nightclub work for musicians.  So there is starting to be pressure in the Zimbabwean, middle class press, for groups to develop their own styles. This is another force behind the use of indigenous musical practices. These young, budding guitar band musicians tried all sorts of different formulas. When they only covered foreign records, they were often criticized for not having their own thing, for not being original. So groups started experimenting to try to come up with an original sound. And Thomas was certainly one of these. And one of the things they hit on, even as early as 1966, was to use indigenous musical styles, and even indigenous songs that were associated with village music making. So that for instance, in 1966, Thomas Mapfumo records a very, very popular song and all sorts of indigenous settings called "Chemtengure,” but he records it with an electric guitar band, with a group called The Springfields. Thomas's version of “Chemtengure” sounds to my ear like a garage band version of rock-and-roll, but singing a Shona song. So these groups—Beatsters, Zebrons, Springfields—they were taking lots of different elements from indigenous music making, sounds, pieces. And each group, on various songs, either used a high-hat in imitation of a hosho Shaker, or in another song the guitarist came up with the idea to rest his hand against the strings, to get the damped guitar technique that sounds like the mbira, or in another song really almost use this indigenous style of huro singing, that high, yodeling singing that John Nkomo used to do. But these were all bits and pieces that were later put together. When we get to the early 1970s, there were different groups like MD Rhythm Success, the Limpopo Jazz Group, and Thomas Mapfumo with Hallelujah Chicken Run. For the first time in 1973 and 74, these groups really put all the elements together. 
B.E: I think the song Thomas created with Joshua Dube, “Ngoma Yarira,” was the first one. B.E: At that time, Afro rock was his thing. He was into Osibisa and he really though that was the new direction for Zimbabwean music. 
B.E: By the way, Crispen Mutema, the producer of this and many of Thomas’s early singles deserves a good measure of credit here too. Thomas has said he was one guy who really saw where things were going. Let's talk about an interesting song from a few years later, “Tumirai Vana Kuhondo.” “Send Your Children to War.” I was very interested, being mbira centric myself, in the use of those kinds of musical indices of indigenous music, and that fits our notion of what musical nationalism should be. But he said, "No, it was really the texts where the action was. The musical sound wasn't that important." So that was his opinion. Other people have other opinions. I think what's important, though, is the kind of overall sense that what is unique to us, and what is local, and ours, is legitimate, and it's beautiful, and important. So the use of indigenous elements in this cosmopolitan context, this blending of the new and old, as a middle class African reporter put it writing about the African nationalist rallies of the early sixties, actually, that blend, I think it supported peoples’ feelings about themselves, and feelings of self-worth, which is a hard thing to really… I mean, you can't pinpoint where this is. It's cumulative. And my argument is that has been going on for more than a decade, really since the late 50s, this kind of move from the source that I describe, this kind of changing mood, changing attitude, not segmenting the cosmopolitan from the indigenous, but joining them together and having that become the model of where things are going. So these artists who did this, they contributed to that. Whatever their own political leanings were, the sound alone contributed to that. 
B.E: The writer Alexander Kanengoni was fighting in Mozambique in the 70s, and he told me about hearing Jonah Sithole’s song “Sabukhu,” one of these mbira guitar songs. He said that everyone around the table fell silent. They all knew that a new direction had been set for the country’s music. B.E: Perhaps. I certainly accept your position that Thomas was one among many. But I do think you have to say that something that separates Thomas from the others is his fidelity to the general formula of adopting indigenous music. Whatever he said or did along the way, once he gets there, he clearly knows this is what he is about, and he doesn't let go. Even though he records a lot of other songs, he never lets go of the idea of remaining loyal to traditional music. 
B.E: I think Thomas does get this pressure to play mbira, but he doesn't mind. That's what he loves most. Drive around with him and his car and that's the music is most likely to be listening to. I remember interviews from the very first time I met him in 1988, when they had just made Chimurenga for Justice and Zimbabwe Mozambique. Chartwell had recently joined the band, and they were talking about wanting to other Zimbabwean sounds. It was, “Yeah, we do the mbira, but people don't realize all the other Zimbabwe traditional sounds there. And we’re trying to find something on every album that we can add in.” I think this is going on right up to the present. If you listen to Thomas's albums, right up to now, there isn’t one that doesn't have at least one complete surprise on it. I don't think he's that constrained by his audience. He likes the idea of the theme album, and he likes the idea of always hitting people with something they don't expect. About ten years ago, he did a cassette called Afro Chimurenga, where he went back to his old Afro rock idea. There isn’t a whiff of mbira on it. He's always looking for something new to pull in, but he doesn't abandon what he's done before. I also think that he would agree with your notion that it's the localizing of the foreign sound that makes it Zimbabwean. B.E: About political content, and the idea of Thomas as a freedom fighter, I always remember you're telling me only met in 1992 that you thought Thomas was braver to sing songs like "Corruption" against Mugabe, than he was to sing against Smith during liberation struggle. How do you think about all that now? 
B.E: Do you have thoughts about the Muzorewa incident, where he was arrested and released on the condition that he play at a Muzorewa rally? He says that at that point he did not support Muzorewa, but felt OK about playing the rally because he was still singing songs about the struggle. B.E: Thomas was pretty clear with me that he him very much admired Muzorewa earlier on, because Muzorewa came from the church. And that was Thomas's background. He also said he was suspicious of Mugabe from the start because Mugabe was a Marxist, and Thomas was very skeptical about that. Now, of course, there's a whole new kind of revisionism going on where people try to distance themselves from Mugabe. But I have quite a bit of evidence that Thomas was not comfortable with Mugabe from the beginning. 
B.E: That is interesting. I find that even Muzorewa's words look pretty good in retrospect. If you read the article with his speech that he gave at the rally were Thomas played, he warns about the leadership’s “fascist” tendencies, and in number of ways predicts what was going to happen. B.E: Well, if it were just a matter of being a capitalist and accumulating, that would be one thing. I think there’s more to say about Mugabe, given his tragic childhood. His father was exiled from the village where they lived by the local Jesuit priest, whom he couldn't get along with. Then Robert’s two older brothers died of illnesses they might have been able to have treated had the family stayed in the village. Then the father, in shame, left, only to return some years later with more children. He then promptly died, and Mugabe was left at a very young age with responsibility for the whole family, and a lot of chips on his shoulder. I think there's some serious psychohistory there to untangle as well. 
B.E: Thanks a lot, Tom. This has been great. Thomas Turino-2005Interview by Banning Eyre University of Illinois, Urbana, IL,2005 Editor's Note: Much of the music featured on the Afropop Worlwide program, Thomas Mapfumo: The War Years comes either from Zimbabwe’s National Archives, by way of Thomas Turino’s personal archive, or else from private collections of no-longer-available singles from the 1970s in Zimbabwe. There are some fine compilations of early Mapfumo music and other related music, listed below. Also, visit the Afropop Music Shop and check out the extensive Thomas Mapfumo catalog available through the Afropop Music Shop, including Afropop Worldwide’s unique 1991 recording of Thomas Mapfumo, Live at SOBs in New York City.  
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