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Zimbabwe's rebel artists target Mugabe
Tafirei Shumba, ZimOnline
March 10, 2008

http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=2840

Harare - Young rebel artists calling themselves Chabvondoka are singing hard-hitting music agitating for political change in Zimbabwe in an album just released entitled House of Hunger that attacks President Robert Mugabe's style of rule.

Chabvondoka is popular street lingo for explosion and is commonly used in reference to nasty situations.

Band leader and song writer, known by his stage name Comrade Fatso, told ZimOnline: "Virtually all tracks on House of Hunger are stinging music based on people's history of life under President Mugabe and the ruling ZANU PF party."

Timed to coincide with the electioneering period, now in full swing ahead of the combined presidential and parliamentary elections this month-end, the album takes sharp glimpses on the lives of struggling masses from the battered opposition political activists to vendors, jobless youths, poor workers and the homeless.

Mugabe, 84, in power since independence from Britain in 1980 and one of the few surviving of Africa's old style "Big-man" rulers, is blamed for the worsening political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe with the highest rate of inflation in the world at over 100 000 percent.

The 12-track album is an embodiment of an emerging culture of music by young Zimbabwean artists fusing poetry, hip hop, afro beat, jazz and chimurenga to produce a militant genre of music and dance called toyi-toyi.

Chimurenga music is a genre of liberation war based songs popularized by freedom fighters during the days of Zimbabwe's 1970s war of independence while toyi-toyi dance was popular by anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa.

House of Hunger is a direct political theme representing the agony of the ordinary Zimbabwean, who besides food, yearns for democracy, justice, equality and freedom - all fundamental human principles missing in this southern African nation ruled with an iron-fist by its octogenarian leader.

Popular dub poets Outspoken and Godobori feature on the album.

The lyrics in the album, unveiled last week to the news media at the Mannenberg Jazz Club and Theatre, do not usually come as brazen as in the track Wonderful Africa.

Here Comrade Fatso condemns political "bootlickers who sing and dance for the powerful. Who sing and support the oppressive leaders".

Said Comrade Fatso: "In Wonderful Africa I condemn the brainwashed people to stop being redundant by groveling over the names of the Mugabes, the Mandelas and the Nkrumahs.

"I am saying people should move on to another political level and see things from a new perspective and reflect on the real issues obtaining today rather than being stuck with the past and all its rhetoric. Yes, political change is overdue in Zimbabwe."

The name of the album is taken from a novel of the same title penned by the late award winning Dambudzo Marechera, an eccentric Zimbabwean author whose thrust in most of his writings was the struggle for black emancipation and mental freedom.

But in Comrade Fatso's own House of Hunger the artist sees things differently: "While Marechera took on the Rhodesian regime, I am taking on the Zimbabwean regime. We want to break this house of hunger that is Zimbabwe and what better time to launch a political album in March and just before the crucial elections."

Whether House of Hunger will reach its intended key music audiences - the masses - is in big doubt. The sole State radio and television stations do not play material critical of the ruling class more so anything that appears directed at Mugabe.

Major record shops are now hesitant to sell the directly hard-hitting music after security agents believed to be the State spy Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) recently forced a city centre jazz club, whose owners asked not to be named, to remove from their record shelves Hugh Masekela's Everything Must Change that calls on President Mugabe to go.

Comrade Fatso and Chabvondoka can only sell the album clandestinely away from the prying eyes of the State agents.

Aka Samm Farai Manro, Comrade Fatso was a finalist in the local Artists for Human Rights Awards last year together with Leonard Zhakata and Thomas Mapfumo both artists whose critical music remains banned on State radio and television.

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