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Burying Sauro: The Necrography of Zimdancehall


Author(s) : Tanaka Chidora, Joseph Mujere
The Zimdancehall Revolution

Abstract


This paper seeks to explore how the late Soul Jah Love (born Saul Musaka)’s songs are a mirror of the deadness that characterised his personal life and the ghetto environment he sang from. We also intend to use Soul Jah Love’s funeral as an entry point into exploring and critiquing the affair between Zimdancehall and the necropolitan state that sought to use the body of a chanter living in death-worlds as extensions of the slates on which it writes its power. Using Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, Butler’s thinking on grievability and the iterations of Panagiotopoulos and Espirito Santo (Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead. Berghahn Books, New York, 2019) and Alex (A Matter of Death and Life: Necrographies of Hip-Hop in Contemporary Detroit. PhD Thesis, UC Santa Barbara. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8xg8182x, 2021) on necrography, this chapter argues that the music of Soul Jah Love is an estate through which we can understand the meaning of death in Soul Jah Love’s life, his environment and the Zimdancehall Movement. Both Soul Jah Love and Zimdancehall are death-bound subjects, so that burying Sauro also takes the meaning of burying the movement. Additionally, the imbrication of Zimdancehall music and the necropolitan state represents those instances where cultures of resistance become part of the very system that must be chanted down, demonstrating, in a way, the necropolitan state’s pervasiveness.


Original language en
Pages (from-to) 233-260
Publication status Published - 2024

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10.1007/978-3-031-41854-9_10

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