Utopia Live: Singing the Mozambican struggle for national liberation
Loading...
Date
2009
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
History Department, University of the Western Cape
Abstract
This article engages a historical reconstruction of the formation of Makonde
revolutionary singing in the process of the Mozambican liberation struggle. The
history of ?Utopia live? is here entrusted to wartime genres, marked by heteroglossia
and the use of metaphor, and referring to moments when the ?space of
experience? and the ?horizon of expectation? of the Struggle were still filled with
uncertainty and the sense of possibility. Progressively, however, singing expressions
were reorganised around socialism?s nodes of meaning. Ideological tropes,
elaborated by Frelimo?s ?courtly? composers, were appropriated in popular singing.
The relations between the ?people? and their leaders were made apparent
through the organization of the performance space. The main contention of the
article is that unofficiality, heteroglossia, metaphor and poetic license, although
they feature in genres that have been marked out as ?popular? in academic discourse,
are by no means intrinsically ?popular?. Much on the contrary, they
are the first victims of populist modes of political actions, that is, of a politics
grounded on a concept of ?people?.
Description
Keywords
Oral traditions, Makonde songs, Revolutionary songs, Frelimo, Liberation struggle, Popular culture, Mozambique
Citation
Israel, P. (2009). Utopia Live: Singing the Mozambican struggle for national liberation. Kronos, 35: 98-141