Date Available

10-30-2021

Year of Publication

2021

Degree Name

Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Fine Arts

Department/School/Program

Music

First Advisor

Dr. Angelique Clay

Abstract

Chimurenga ChePfungwa is the self-liberation of the mind. Education can either be an instrument for liberation or a tool for colonial indoctrination, brainwashing, and enslavement — the European colonization of Africa in the late-nineteenth century and the continent's epic efforts at self-liberation have amply taught us this.

Chimurenga ChePfungwa calls for the centering of ChiVanhu knowledge systems such as Ngano, Tsumo neNziyo. ChiVanhu encapsulates Madzimbabwe indigenous knowledge systems, cosmologies, and ways of being, and this paper insists on the primacy of these ChiVanhu epistemologies for the construction of knowledge and knowing.

Amagama ayadala. Words create. So much of the language currently circulating scholarly discourse about Madzimbabwe’s history, present, and future, has all been constructed through a colonial lens. Chimurenga ChePfungwa shatters that colonial lens and refocuses the language on Vana Vevhu, the indigenous people of Madzimbabwe by defining and utilizing Liberated Terms. Chimurenga ChePfungwa also creates Liberated Zones — self-created locales that hold space for the awakening, healing, and deeper exploration of individual and collective consciousness through cultural learning, re-learning, memory and re-memory.

This paper offers a liberated account of Madzimbabwe’s socio-political history and elucidates the stakes of cultural (re)production in Madzimbabwe. The paper also offers an anthology of songs that summon the spirit of joy, healing, liberation, and freedom.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2021.469

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