MUNYANGA: Time For Musicians to Defend Human Rights

It was used as general entertainment at weddings, funerals and ritual ceremonies.

Secondly, music was used to censure wayward members of society, be they ordinary folks or kings. Songs were composed for murderers, rapists and cruel leaders alike.

Music’s third role in Africa was to boost the morale of farmers during cultivation.

In the farming season, men and women, often numbering in hundreds, tilled the land responding in unison to lyrics and drumbeats, raising their hoes high and cutting the ground as if they were just one hand.

By so doing, a very big field took only hours to cultivate. Remember, Africa had no tractors but food security was a priority.

With the coming of colonialism, music was extensively used to entertain the “masters”, who were just left mesmerized by the spontaneous movement of the African bodies as if the men and women were boneless, something that belied the eyes, since the world agrees, in physical terms, Africans were the sturdiest!

That was also the beginning of using music for political ends.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere once said he did not quite like traditional dances but credited them with preserving the African race because when gun toting invaders came, Africans received them with dancing.

And, it would be an extremely wicked person who would shoot at fellow human beings who welcomed him with dancing!

Mwalimu often compared the fate of the Red Indians to that of the Africans.

Red Indians fought gun carrying invaders with their fire spitting arrows, somehow believing their arrows were equivalent to bullets! The outcome is now history.

In the Americas today, they are mocked as the “First Nations” and confined to their reserved territories!

But political music had its downside. It tended to corrupt the moral fabric of the musicians and composers, who increasingly became the songbirds of the powerful and mighty in society.

At least, that is was the scenario inherited at independence.

ANOTHER CUP OF WINE

For post-independence African leaders, music became the equivalent of another cup of wine that they downed and tossed at their grandiose parties, corrupting and intoxicating their morality beyond repair.

So, Hon. Justice Augustino Ramadhani, the President of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) had a point when he called on artists and musicians in Arusha recently, to come up with works that depicted and spoke against violation of human rights in Africa and the world in general.

Apart from being a fine jurist, Justice Ramadhani is also an accomplished pianist as he serves he serves the Lord also in his Anglican Church and faith.

Thus, in a way, he was talking to fellow musicians and artistes. 

He knows the power of music. Rapists may have never been sent to prison in old-fashioned Africa but to have lyrics composed and sang about them at weddings and funerals, was no doubt, extremely punitive.

To sum it all up, musicians and artists in Africa wake up. There is new work to be done.

In concrete terms, Justice Ramadhani did not call on the musicians to do something new but rather to connect to that ancestral spirits, which in times past, kept the excesses of both the criminals and kings in check. Nothing can be nobler.

By Mboneko Munyaga East African News Agency