Moral Authority of Shona Women’s Battlesongs: Revising Customary Law in the Context of Performance Within African Indigenous Knowledge System

Abstract

Studies abound that explore the linguistic and internal dynamics of battlesongs in Africa and globally. However, little work has been devoted to unearthing how Shona women’s songs acquire their moral authority to rebuke. This study is based on purposive sampling of Shona women’s songs that repudiate socially unacceptable stereotypes. Theories of historical analysis, comparative interpretation and linguistic strategies of selving cultural voice can assist in reviewing the power of songs of complaint that Shona women of Zimbabwe have created. Female singers tend to inflect old songs with new content to articulate rebuke and insult because women imagine songs as alternative to actual battles waged along racial, class, and gendered lines in contemporary Zimbabwe. Findings of the study point to the fact that women’s songs ridicule individual men, women and patriarchal institutions imagined as the enemies to women’s emancipation. Women’s songs also tend to be imagined by women elaborating some form of “soft” law that women can artistically use to prosecute cultural crimes of social injustice. The study recommends that future studies on battlesongs should endeavour to interrogate and magnify social dynamics inherent in ethnographic approaches to identity formations.