The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) music videos and the mutation of the Chimurenga genre in Zimbabwe.

This paper explores how musicians sympathetic to MDC appropriate, exploit, and ultimately seem to fall victim to the narrative traps present in Chimurenga music and its role in Zimbabwe's political history. In this paper MDC's Chimurenga music videos and songs are analyzed to bring out deep lying meanings and placed in a historic context. The paper analyses how the visual and lyrical content contest the 'authorized' version of Chimurenga to the extent of creating a new understanding of Chimurenga discourse and Chimurenga music. The selected video text helps identify lines of appropriation and contamination/mutation as it traces and contextualizes the evolution of the MDC war song up to a point it generically becomes similar to the traditions of Chimurenga established in the 70s. It is crucial to look at how a sense of 'memory' is 'extracted' as well as how it is re/packaged, re/distributed and received or contested in the service of MDC's counter hegemonic propaganda. In this vein, we do not seek just to point moments or points of appropriation but also instances of mutation/violation that the MDC music videos usher into the narrative of the Chimurenga discourse especially in a post-colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]