Migration often leads to significant socio-cultural and psychological challenges, particularly for Zimbabweans living in South Africa, many of whom face the stigma of being labelled as “illegal” or “undocumented.” This study explores how mediated music, defined as music circulated through digital and broadcast platforms, supports the well-being of Zimbabwean immigrants in Johannesburg. Drawing on self-reported experiences, this article demonstrates how listening to familiar music from home fosters emotional resilience, cultural identity, and community connection. Through mediated music, immigrants manage stress, alleviate feelings of isolation, and find temporary respite from the hardships associated with their precarious legal status. Music not only provides distraction from daily challenges but also serves as a motivating force and a conduit for nostalgia, helping immigrants maintain ties to their homeland while negotiating their new environment. This study highlights the critical role of music in improving subjective well-being, offering insights into how immigrants navigate identity and belonging through their musical choices.

In this article, I trace the history and examine the role of gbokos (commercial indigenised wind band formation) in nurturing the jazz sensibilities of members while contributing to the broader social fabric in Lagos State, Nigeria. I employ the method of collaborative autoethnography to construct this account, drawing on the experience I share with five other musicians with roots in the tradition to develop a narrative on gbokos which spans three decades (1978 to 2008). Furthermore, the article engages the respectability discourse as a point of departure into the concept of ọmọlúàbí (a Yorùbá morality code) and how gbokos musicians negotiated this in cosmopolitan Lagos. More broadly, the article highlights a typical lived reality among gbokos musicians. The study found that although many conservative middle-class Christians are ambivalent towards gbokos, it supports burgeoning musicians. They derive social capital, foundational highlife, and jazz education through the peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge and musical materials, as well as economic benefits from the formation. Gbokos has thus become foundational to many thriving performance careers. The formation will better fulfil its role of raising musicians while contributing to the broader social fabric through an improved structure and (governmental and corporate) sponsorship. In turn, gbokos is potentially resourceful as a cultural hub for the government of Lagos State.

Reggae music emerged in the 1960s, an era of intense anti-colonial and anti-imperialist sentiments and struggles. Having originated in Jamaica, a jurisdiction where Africans had been enslaved, the genre has a tradition of social criticisms, especially the depravity that asymmetrical power relations extend to Africans globally. Through its Rastafari influences, reggae offers an avenue for redemptive philosophies and complex frameworks to waken consciousness and to offer identity, pride and dignity. To decolonise knowledge and conscientise the marginalised on the issues that enslave them, this article analyses four reggae songs by three artists to show how the content of some reggae songs can serve as critical literature for critical pedagogy (CP) in the African academe. CP creates the atmosphere for learners to identify the machinations of dominant forces in education and how to nurture agency for liberation. It promotes an association between education and society, arguing against the annexation of higher education by private capital. The ethos of reggae music, Rastafari and CP converge on the interactions between knowledge, authority and power.

This article outlines an analysis that sought to examine how “early” jiti music has shaped contemporary jiti in Zimbabwe to not only identify aspects that define jiti but also to demonstrate how the style is a historical reality, rooted in the past and generated by the present. To do this, the authors focused on the music of the Bhundu Boys, one of the earliest groups to popularise and influence contemporary jiti music suggesting that their music, in particular the songs that were analysed, serve as examples of songs that are influenced by issues explored in jiti music. The authors also selected songs by Baba Harare, a contemporary jiti popular musician, and analysed how his music either relates to and/or departs from that of the Bhundu Boys. Using British historian Eric Hobsbawm's theory of invented traditions, which states that traditions can be revived or reinvented, the authors identified various adaptation strategies used by both the Bhundu Boys and Baba Harare to reconstitute jiti for popular music performance. The analysis of jiti popular music performance by both early performers of the style and contemporary ones showed that there is an expected “framework of performance and interpretation” for this style for it to continue representing certain traditional values and identities in Zimbabwe.

The purpose of this case study was to explore the extent to which Dalcroze-inspired activities can facilitate collective learning in a choir as a community of musical practice (CoMP). The research intervention was conducted in a newly formed multi-ethnic high school choir in Germiston, Gauteng, South Africa. Data sources included in-depth semi-structured interviews, researcher field notes of rehearsals and concerts, video recordings of weekly rehearsals, as well as lesson plans developed for each rehearsal. The data was analysed within the conceptual framework of the social theory of collective learning as developed by Wenger (1998) and expanded by Murillo's (2011) conceptualisation of: (1) engagement in practice (learning as doing); (2) a community of musical practice (learning as belonging); (3) construction of personal identity (learning as becoming); and (4) negotiation of meaning (learning as experiencing). The findings expanded the theoretical framework of collective learning. It was found that Dalcroze-inspired activities nurture collective learning and form an essential part of choristers’ feelings of belonging in a choir as a CoMP.

ABSTRACTThe role played by music as “popular culture” in political campaigning and in the perpetuation and sustenance of political hegemonies is a very significant one. Music and its accompaniment of dance is a common and popular channel through which political hegemonies are (re)constructed, (re)negotiated and perpetuated. In Zimbabwe the two largest political parties (ZANU-PF and MDC-T) both “own” musical ensembles who have been constantly and consistently producing political party specific lyrics as part of the utilisation of music as popular culture in the broader political discourse of electioneering and election campaigning. Musical lyrics exude attempts at the (re)construction and (re)negotiation of political meaning and reality and by extension the (re)negotiation and (re)configuration of power relations and dynamics. Selected lyrics from the ZANU-PF musical ensemble, Mbare Chimurenga Choir, are examined through the discourse linguistic theory of Appraisal. This is done by examining how the proliferation of linguistic resources that espouse politically and ideologically embedded positive attitudinal resources exhibit a perpetuation of Robert Mugabe’s rule, legacy and hegemony and by extension, that of ZANU-PF. While the analysis is largely couched within Appraisal Theory, the study also draws insights from Gramscian hegemony studies as well as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The study observes and discusses, as the context for analysis of the discourse linguistic structure of the lyrics, the political environment prevailing in Zimbabwe during the period in which analysed songs were produced. Language (the lyrics), is in this regard perceived of as a superstructural semiotic tool through which hegemonies are (re)constructed, (re)negotiated and sustained.

ABSTRACTRaewyn Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as the most “honoured” way of being a man, and as such all men in patriarchal societies are expected to try to meet the standards of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmitt 2005). It can be encountered in a variety of everyday contexts, one of which is sporting events. This article explores the authors’ ethnographic encounters with hegemonic masculinities amongst football fans in Zimbabwe, particularly in the songs they sing. Utilising Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, the authors argue that Zimbabwean football fandom is entangled with hegemonic masculinities. The article demonstrates a simultaneously covert and subtle, but always complex, relationship between football fandom and masculinities, specifically hegemonic masculinity. The study’s major conclusion is that hegemonic masculinity is strongly discursive and occasionally occurs even in seemingly harmless mundane banter, such as stadium songs. Despite the sometimes jovial nature of these performances, there are power undercurrents involved.

ABSTRACTZimbabwe’s protracted anti-Euro-American imperialist rhetoric and subsequent draconian policies that imposed a 100 per cent local content on national radio and television birthed a particular type of popular urban youth music genre (urban grooves), which has radically transformed the urban public sphere in the country. In this article, I examine the music and lyrics of one prominent gospel urban grooves artist—Mudiwa “Hood” Mutandwa. I particularly analyse the complex intersections of his musical discourse with prosperity gospel dogma propagated in contemporary Pentecostal Charismatic Churches (PCCs). Mudiwa’s musical discourse resonates with prosperity gospel ideologies propagated in the emergent and popular PCCs in Zimbabwe. Mudiwa’s music not only creates, but also reinforces a consumerist and materialist culture amongst the urban youth in Harare. Although Mudiwa’s musical discourse runs counter to the grim economic realities on the ground, it enables the deprived urban youth to symbolically make sense of their nostalgic and yet elusive aspirations of being wealthy in an economic and political crisis symptomatic of a postcolonial state.