Unpeaceful music

Zimbabwean popular music has carried a civic weight that goes beyond entertainment. From the chimurenga songs of the liberation struggle to the social commentary found in urban grooves and Zimdancehall, musicians have often spoken for ordinary people when formal politics would not and in most cases against political repression. They have given shape to grievances that might otherwise have no place to go. But what happens to that role when musicians become direct and repeated beneficiaries of political patronage delivered in the form of cars and cash.

Since 2023, the Zimbabwean businessman Wicknell Chivayo has built much of his public reputation around giving. He has handed out more than one hundred vehicles, along with large cash sums, to musicians, broadcasters, sportspeople, and church leaders. The musician Jah Prayzah, a known ZANU-PF sympathiser, is reported to have received close to a million US dollars in cars and cash between 2024 and 2026, including a Mercedes-Benz S500, a Range Rover, a 2026 Ford Ranger Platinum, and large separate cash payouts.

However, several other prominent artists have also accepted lavish gifts. Among the high-profile musicians, Sungura legend Aleck Macheso was gifted a Mercedes-Benz GLE and a 2026 Toyota Fortuner GD6, Zimdancehall star Freeman HKD received a Mercedes-Benz GLE 400d alongside US$10,000, and artists such as Sulumani Chimbetu, Tocky Vibes, and EXQ were also gifted luxury vehicles. In the comedy and entertainment space, prominent street-theatre comedian Freddy "Kapfupi" Manjalima was given multiple Toyota Aqua vehicles and cash, while other digital creators and content creators who praised Chivayo also walked away with Mercedes-Benz models and cash rewards.

It would be too simple to say that a car or a cash gift buys an artist's silence outright. The process seems to work more quietly than that. An artist who has been given a vehicle in public, with cameras present and the moment shared widely online, is placed in a position where criticising the political order risks more than disapproval. It risks the appearance of biting the hand that fed him. Chivayo's giving tends to concentrate on people with influence in politics, entertainment, and religion, and that it serves less to build anything lasting than to reward loyalty and celebrity. An artist who has accepted such a gift cannot easily speak against the conditions that produced it without also implicating himself.

This pattern became visible during the campaign around Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill Number 3, gazetted in February 2026. The bill proposed replacing direct presidential elections with selection by Parliament, extending presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years, and repealing several independent institutions, among them the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission. Civil society groups, lawyers, and opposition figures argued that the bill would narrow the public's role in choosing its leaders. Public hearings held in March and April 2026 were reportedly marked by disruption and intimidation.

This was the kind of moment in which Zimbabwean musicians have, at other times, found something to say. They did not. I am reminded of Tuku’s mukana where he sang about the importance of consultation in making a humane constitution. I will reproduce some of the lyrics here;

Bumbiro remitemo remusha uno varume Ngarirongerwe vanhu nevanhu Bumbiro remitemo remusha uno vakoma Ngarirongerwe vanhu sevanhu Bumbiro remitemo remusha uno varume Ngarirongerwe vanhu nevanhu (rongaivo zvemusha uno) Bumbiro remitemo remusha uno vakoma Ngarirongerwe vanhu sevanhu (rongaivo zvemusha uno) Mozisi akapiwa mitemo ine gumi Kuti tishandise isu vanhu Iyesu vanhu vanorongera vamwe mitemo ine zana (rongaivo zvemusha uno) Mozisi akapiwa mitemo ine gumi Kuti tishandise isu vanhu Iyesu vanhu vanorongera vamwe mitemo ine zana (rongaivo zvemusha uno) Ipapo pamunoronga Zvamunoronga (vane njere dzavainadzo) Vapei mukana wekuronga nekurongonora (rongaivo zvemusha uno) Ndati pamucharongapo (itai vanhu vazivewo) Zvamakaronga (vane njere dzavainadzo) Vapei mukana wekuronga nekurongonora (rongaivo zvemusha uno)

The advice on mukana was given to us a little over a decade ago in 2012, as we were making Ammendment number 20, which replaced the Lanchester House Constitution in 2013. Fast forward to 2026, artists with the largest audiences, the ones whose faces are most familiar across the country, were mostly absent from the public conversation about the bill, even while lawyers and clergy spoke openly against it. The silence was noticeable mainly because of who was silent. These are people with the platforms and the public trust to shape how ordinary citizens feel about what is happening to them, and they chose, or perhaps felt unable, to use them.

It should be said plainly that this silence was not unique to gifted musicians. Most public figures, gifted or not, said little about CAB3, and Zimbabwe has a longer history of caution in the face of any contentious political moment, one that predates Chivayo's giving by decades. Fear of state retaliation, simple risk aversion, and a general weariness with politics probably explain a good part of the quiet. The argument here is narrower than a claim that gifting alone produced the silence. It is that gifting adds something to a silence that fear has already made common, something that makes the silence easier to sustain and harder to break. A musician already inclined to caution by the political climate has, after a public car handover, an additional and more personal reason to stay cautious. Gifting does not replace fear. It supplements it, and it does so for a specific subset of figures who might otherwise have had the standing to break the general silence rather than follow it.

It may help to begin with an image. Speaking against the person who has just fed you does not come easily. The food is still in your mouth. But an image of this kind can only carry an argument so far, and it is worth trying to say more plainly what seems to be happening.

There appear to be at least three separate channels at work, and they are probably not equally strong in every case. The first is public association. An artist photographed receiving a car from a man closely tied to the ruling party cannot easily turn around and criticise that party without the criticism reading as bad faith, or worse, as a performance staged for some other audience. The second is something closer to self-censorship. The artist may expect that any future criticism will be met not with counter-argument but with reminders of the gift, a reframing of dissent as ingratitude that weakens the force of whatever was said. The third is more social than personal. Once a number of prominent musicians have accepted gifts and stayed quiet, those who have not accepted anything may hesitate to speak alone, wary of standing out as the exception or being read as seeking attention rather than expressing genuine concern. These three channels are not the same thing, and a fuller study would want to know which one is doing the most work in a given case. But they seem to converge on the same result, a narrowing of the space in which cultural voice can be used without some cost attached to it.

There is something to be said here about how a public sphere works, or fails to work, when this happens. Music in Zimbabwe has often filled a space that courts, newspapers, and parliament cannot reach. It speaks where formal language does not. When the most visible voices in that space withdraw from the moments that matter most, the space itself becomes less able to do the work it has always done, which is to let ordinary grievance be heard and felt to matter. This is not the same as repression in the formal sense. No one has been arrested for failing to comment on the bill. But the effect on public voice may not be so different.

Lederach has written that sustainable peace depends less on signed agreements than on a society's capacity to imagine and sustain relationships across the lines that once divided it, what he calls the moral imagination. That capacity needs places to practice itself, and music has long been one of those places in Zimbabwe, a setting where people across political and ethnic lines could find something held in common. Gifting does not destroy that capacity outright. But it narrows the range of things a shared cultural space is willing to say about the conditions under which people are actually living. A society can keep its music and lose much of what that music used to do. At present, Zimbabwe has camps of music supporters based on political affiliation. People still dance to their favourite songs, but music is in Zimbabwe is pseudo battle ground.

This matters for peace, in the sense the word carries when it is more than the absence of war. Peace depends on people believing that there are channels through which their frustration can be expressed and that doing so means something. When those channels grow quieter, frustration does not disappear. It looks for somewhere else to go, and the places it finds may not be peaceful ones.

There is a slower cost too. If a constitutional amendment of this scale can pass through a climate where the country's most prominent cultural voices say almost nothing, ordinary citizens learn something about what their own voice is worth. They may come to feel that elections and hearings are things to be gone through rather than contests that respond to what people actually think. This kind of learning is hard to undo, partly because no one had to silence anyone by force. The silence arrived on its own, dressed as gratitude.

It is worth asking, even without a clear answer, what kind of nation is being built when its most visible cultural figures have been drawn one by one into a patronage economy that rewards them most for staying quiet at the moments when speaking would have cost the most. A country can still hold elections, still gazette its amendments, still convene its public hearings, while the public's actual capacity to contest what is happening to it is hollowed out quietly, through gifts rather than guns. This costs the state very little. It may achieve much of what repression is meant to achieve, without looking like repression at all.

If elections are to mean something, and if a bill like CAB3 is to be tested against real public feeling rather than managed acquiescence, then an independent cultural voice may need to be understood as part of what keeps a peace durable, not as a separate question of artistic ethics. The drawing of popular musicians into this kind of gift economy should perhaps not be read only as a story about flashy cars. It may be a quieter sign of something being lost from the structures that allow a country to argue with itself peacefully.

Wicknell Chivayo's gifts to Zimbabwean musicians and by extension untalented skit makers are not only a question of individual compromise. They may be part of a wider pattern that empties out public voice exactly when voice is needed most, as seen in the silence that surrounded Constitution Amendment Bill Number 3. There is a danger that our communities will slowly lose confidence that voice, cultural or otherwise, still changes anything.

The effects of a hollowed-out public sphere are not confined to Zimbabwe. A country that has lost much of its internal capacity for voice tends to export its frustrations across borders. The movement of Zimbabweans into South Africa, driven by economic collapse and political uncertainty rather than by any single event, has continued through 2026.

It may be useful to think about the limits of buying silence. It seems to work well enough on cultural and even political elites, who have something to gain from staying quiet and something to lose by speaking. It is less clear that it can work on a population dealing with the everyday difficulty of feeding a family. If frustration born of economic hardship and political exclusion eventually organises itself outside these patronage structures, it is unlikely to look for guidance from uncouth space. Such a movement would probably not be schooled in negotiation. I fear for that! It's unpeaceful. But so is a silence that is bought rather than earned. It is not the same as peace. It may simply be peace deferred.