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Popular songs and the creation and expansion of Shona orthography in Zimbabwe

Abstract Music research in Africa has tended to focus on the analysis of lyrics in search of overt political content. This has yielded enormous and sometimes incisive academic work. However, research in music is yet to explore the political economy of the infrastructure of music production from composition, recording, marketing and paying of royalties. One aspect of music research that has also received little scholarly attention is the role of songs not simply in carrying the messages from composer to audience, but in helping in the creation of new words that are then popularised in cultural communities where these words are absorbed into the community's cultural and linguistic grammars. In Zimbabwe, two momentous historical periods, which are the liberation struggle (1970s) and the era of the Third Chimurenga (from 2000), reveal how the medium of song was used to generate a new vocabulary that has become part of the country's orthography. While some of the vocabulary so created during these periods is yet to enter dictionaries, most of these vocabularies have become the lingua franca in most African communities. This paper illustrates how the three domains of culture, politics and economics have benefitted from the capacity of song in creating, assimilating, appropriating and naming new realities in contexts marked by the inexorable processes of the violent uncoupling between the old political order and the new nationalist political dispensation ushered in by the various and legitimate phases of Zimbabwe's liberation struggles.