PICTURE: Zimbabwe musicians have to improve their music so that
festivals like Harare International Festival of Arts
and Harare International Carnival attract
more of foreign tourists than foreign artistes
MUSIC Festivals can be a form of tourism when people visit another town, city or country in order to attend music concerts and festivals. For a place to be involved in music tourism, it has to organise either an event for big and popular musical groups from other places to perform or capitalise on the place’s own big names in the music industry.
To get a clear picture of how such arrangements can work, let’s consider the following example. A place like St Ann Parish in Jamaica where reggae icon Bob Marley was born can arrange a Bob Marley festival to coincide with either his birthday or death day. Such a festival can attract scores of Bob Marley fans to the little known place. In turn, the town can reap the benefits of such musical tourism.
Brazil is a fine example of a country that has benefited much from a music celebration called Rio Carnival. The carnival is said to be attracting more than half a million foreign tourists to Brazil. Globally, music tourism is estimated to be making over 10 million people travel to foreign lands for the purpose of consuming or providing services at the musical festivals with lands like the aforesaid Brazil, Spain, United Kingdom and India among the top beneficiaries.
When a city or town hosts such a festival, the main advantage is that it gets a huge circulation of money during the festival period. Cash is made through sale of gate tickets, accommodation, food, souvenirs and transport. After the festival, some tourists might want to visit some places of interest near the host town or city.
Although they were not named in any local musician name, the now defunct music galas of Chimanimani Arts Festival and Mutare Jazz Festival held in the sleepy town of Chimanimani and Mutare respectively are good examples of how Manicaland Province once promoted music tourism banking on its own music icons. Chimanimani Arts Festival capitalised on the late Chioniso Maraire’s roots at Chakohwa. Mutare Jazz Festival benefitted from jazz drummers Sam Mataure’s being a Mutare son and the late Jethro Shasha’s roots in Dora Dombo.
A music tourist to Mutare Jazz Festival was expected to end up visiting place like Nyangani Mountains or Vumba Mountains to enjoy the scenic features that the places offer. A tourist to Chimanimani Arts festival would also tour the Hot Springs. Thus, music tourism can open business for other forms of tourism like cultural and heritage tourism.
Our own country has seen galas which has international flavour like Harare International Festival of Arts, Harare International Carnival and Victoria Falls Carnival. They are a platform were local fans can consume music by international artistes. With our local festivals, international acts seem to be the main crowd pullers.
For music tourism to benefit the country, the local artistes should be the ones who pull overseas crowd to attend show here. It is a fact that overseas tourists have a higher spending than local tourists. This bring us to the question if Zimbabwe music can attract foreign tourists?
Throughout the years, Zimbabwe has seen musical groups producing music that include the following genres: traditional mbira, rumba, sungura, jit, jazz, reggae, rock, disco, house and pop. While the country cannot expect foreign genres to attract overseas tourists into the country, genres that identify Zimbabwe like traditional mbira, jit and sungura should be pivotal in promoting music tourism. But are they able to pull the foreign crowds?
At the turn of the millennium, the genres started to slowly lose taste bit by bit. Lack of variety and creativity has killed our music. Sungura music is revolving around beats that are synonymous with Leonard Dembo, Simon and Naison Chimbetu, Nicholas Zacharia and Solomon Skuza as mbira revolves around Thomas Mapfumo. Jit music isn’t that competitive. On radio, one has to depend on a disc jockey’s announcement to identify the name of an artiste who sang a track. Most songs sound the same. Worse still sungura, has become heavily diluted with rumba beats from the Great Lakes region.
To mention but just a few, one needs to listen to songs like “Mundikumbuke” by Lucius Banda of Malawi, “Liza Olo” by The Mighty Victoria C Kings of Kenya, “Simakala” by Nguashi N’timbo of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), “Ya Mbemba (Zimbabwe)” by Sam Mangwana of DRC, “Kasuku (Kajituliza)” by Les Wanyika of Tanzania, “Zangalewa” by Golden Sounds of Cameroon, “Samini” by Samini of Ghana and “Mazuzu” by West Nkosi of South Africa to see how most of our revered artistes have sunk so low into cheaply recycling music from other countries. The list is endless. Can this attract music tourists? There is no way our music festivals can attract music tourists from the region and abroad when we fail to maintain our own identity and heavily depend on genres and beats that are recycled from the prospective tourists’ lands. Zimbabwean artistes need to up their trade in order to make meaningful contributions to music tourism.