Challenges depictions of law as a façade for political repression by examining political trials in Zimbabwe after 2000.

Focusing on political trials in Zimbabwe's Magistrates' Courts between 2000 and 2012, Susanne Verheul explores why the judiciary have remained a central site of contestation in post-independence Zimbabwe. Drawing on rich court observations and in-depth interviews, this book foregrounds law's potential to reproduce or transform social and political power through the narrative, material, and sensory dimensions of courtroom performances. Instead of viewing appeals to law as acts of resistance by marginalised orders for inclusion in dominant modes of rule, Susanne Verheul argues that it was not recognition by but of this formal, rule-bound ordering, and the form of citizenship it stood for, that was at stake in performative legal engagements. In this manner, law was much more than a mere instrument. Law was a site in which competing conceptions of political authority were given expression, and in which people's understandings of themselves as citizens were formed and performed.

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

This collection of essays documents, conceptualises and theorises the ways in which Zimbabwean, in particular, and African practitioners, in general, creatively work and perform in contemporary Africa. It serves to consolidate the ways in which Zimbabwean and African performance is made and understood by Zimbabwean practitioners and theorists. The book examines this emergent, dynamic performance movement which transforms performances into acts of reflection, engagement, and/or discussion between the performer and spectator through various creative performative avenues, such as interjections, call and response, singing, clapping and use of communally identifiable everyday objects in design, which affirm and fuse the actors and spectators together. Finally, this book exposes the dominant exclusivity and Anglocentrism in critical pedagogies of performance in Zimbabwe through problematizing the “taken-for-grantedness” of the accepted ways in which performance and theory have been conceptualised.

Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe analyses the revitalisation and repatriation of historical recordings from the largest sound archive in Africa, the International Library of African Music (ILAM). It provides a postcolonial study on the African sound archive divided into three historical periods: the colonial period offers a critical analysis on how ILAM classifies its music through ethnic and linguistic groups; the postcolonial period reconsiders postcolonial nationhood, new/old mobility and cultural border crossing in present Africa; and the recent period of repatriation focuses on the author’s revitalisation of the sound archive. The main goal of this study is to reconsider the colonial demarcations of southern African mbira music provided by the International Library of African Music (ILAM). These mbira recordings reveal that the harmonic system used in different lamellophones (or mbiras) in southern Africa is musically related. The analysis of sound archives in Africa is an essential tool to envision the new ways in which African culture can be directed not only from postcolonial notions of nationhood or Afrocentric discourses but also for the necessity of bringing awareness of the circulation of musical cultures from and beyond colonial African borders.

This book is a critical reflection on the life and career of the late legendary Zimbabwean music icon, Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi, and his contribution towards the reconstruction of Zimbabwe, Africa and the globe at large. Mtukudzi was a musician, philosopher, and human rights activist who espoused the agenda of reconstruction in order to bring about a better world, proposing personal, cultural, political, religious and global reconstruction. With twenty original chapters, this vibrant volume examines various themes and dimensions of Mtukudzi’s distinguished life and career, notably, how his music has been a powerful vehicle for societal reconstruction and cultural rejuvenation, specifically speaking to issues of culture, human rights, governance, peacebuilding, religion and identity, humanism, gender and politics, among others. The contributors explore the art of performance in Mtukudzi’s music and acting career, and how this facilitated his reconstruction agenda, offering fresh and compelling perspectives into the role of performing artists and cultural workers such as Mtukudzi in presenting models for reconstructing the world.

This book explores the “battles” of words, songs, poetry, and performance in Africa and the African Diaspora. These are usually highly competitive, artistic contests in which rival parties duel for supremacy in poetry composition and/or its performance. This volume covers the history of this battle tradition, from its origins in Africa, especially the udje and halo of the Urhobo and Ewe respectively, to its transportation to the Americas and the Caribbean region during the Atlantic slave trade period, and its modern and contemporary manifestations as battle rap or other forms of popular music in Africa. Almost everywhere there are contemporary manifestations of the more traditional, older genres. The book is thus made up of studies of contests in which rivals duel for supremacy in verbal arts, song-poetry, and performance as they display their wit, sense of humor, and poetic expertise.