Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the colonial sound archive in order to demonstrate the different forms of people's mobility and relationships between communities occurring in southern Africa informed, musically and lyrically, by the songs and musicians appearing in the sound archive. The book explores linguistic and ethnic categorisations of African music by ILAM. It examines how ILAM's classification of African music through ethnicity and language conditioned the specific study of Shona mbira music in southern Africa. The book provides a critical analysis of Andrew Tracey's Shona chord cadence by identifying similar chord cadences from ILAM's recordings outside Mashonaland. It examines the commodification of the mbira repertoire through nationalist songs and the homogenous notion of mbira music that does not address the diversity of lamellophones in Zimbabwe but rather promotes the music from two types of Shona mbira, the mbira nhare and the nyunganyunga.