Indigenising psycho-social support: an examination of Oliver Mtukudzi’s music in the context of the Shona community’s indigenous health practices.

Abstract

The Korekore community in Fumhe village, a rural enclave tucked in Northern Zimbabwe’s district of Mbire, is a coterie of culturally rich members whose indigenous practices play out in ethnic music as a culturally-codified mode of performative production. As a native of this community, Oliver Mtukudzi composed and performed songs that denote the cosmology and cosmogony of a people whose lives tap into the resourcefulness of culture as a pervasive element in social, political and religious spheres of existence. Whilst previous studies have placed huge attention on the didactic and aesthetic functions of Mtukudzi’s music, this study sought to explore the artist’s music with particular focus on its merits as a reflector and enabler of the Shona community’s indigenous health practices in the domain of psycho-social support for the bereaved. The qualitative study conducted seven in-depth interviews with a view to understanding African indigenous approaches to psycho-social health in the context of death, bereavement, grief and loss. Also, through a lekgotla (African indigenous colloquium) and a woman-only focus group discussion (both conducted in Fumhe village in June 2023), the qualitative study enlisted the participation of community members as key stakeholders in the creation, deployment and optimisation of knowledge systems as they play out in the population under study. Riding on interpretive phenomenology, the study deployed analytical tenets from a framework of concepts that combined Postcolonial Indigenous theory, Culture-Centered Approach and African Cultural Studies to explore Shona healing practices. The framework facilitated an indigenous oriented entry into the African healing paradigm, debunking the narrow confines of Eurocentric certitudes that for years used ‘biomedicalisation’ to frame healthcare systems. Instead, decolonial studies champion the ‘sociology of health’ amongst communities of the African Global South whose scholarship locates health, wellness and healing within a cultural context. To understand the indigenous healing interventions of a community, one needs to phenomenologically appreciate the community’s conceptualisation of health within its cultural-situatedness. It is against this backdrop that this study appropriates the lenses of ethnography, folklore and cultural anthropology to explore indigenous knowledge systems as encapsulated in the corpus of African music and the discourses it generates. Among its key findings, this study found that for the Shona community, music is a part of everyday life that connects the dead with the living, hence it obtains within a cultural cosmology that ensures closure. Also, the concept of ‘community bereavement’ denotes the merits of social cohesion. Acknowledging the scope of music in psycho-social support, the study contributes to knowledge by establishing that in the Shona community, healing for the bereaved occurs at multiple levels, with self, others, and the environment being interconnected factors that cannot be disaggregated from the quadrant of a community galvanised by the relational ethos of holism. The study also unearths a ‘social equality group’ dimension to support in bereavement, foregrounding women’s critical role as carers, nurturers and restorers who champion the healing cause. Interestingly, ‘maternal valorisation’ ignites potent contestations for healing discourses in a community whose exclusionary patterns of relations denote patriarchy as a domineering socio-cultural operating system.