Canonising the fast track land reform as a crisis: Enganging Thomas Mapfumo's selected post -2000 songs

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the music of the currently self-exiled musician Thomas Mapfumo and how he has appropriated, like other musicians, the Chimurenga genre as a platform for airing his concerns over the land issue. It does this by tracing the history of Mapfumo in as far as the land issue is concerned, from the celebratory mood of the 1980s when he had hope that blacks would get their land back, then into the disappointment and disillusionment with the government inaction in the 1990s when he sang ‘Maiti kurima hamubviri’ (You said tilling the land was easy). The chapter further notes that his preoccupation with the land has been constant because in the early 2000s he again raises this issue, but this time pointing out and conscientising the public that land had been given to those who did not deserve it. rthermore, Mapfumo holds that land was given even to the lazy ones as he points out in one of the songs that redistributing land to those who had no skills and capacity was tantamount to sowing hunger, and famine. The overarching argument maintained in the chapter is that Mapfumo is not against the land reform programme per se, but the manner in which it has been carried out and that it has benefitted those who least deserve it.