Changes in Marriage & Gender (cont’d)

Such changes in gender and family roles generally take time, over generations, to fully take root. Jonathan’s grandfather, for example, had five wives, who formed their own community together in a rural area. In such settings, the intimacy between a husband and one wife does not generally trump the collective bonds of the women’s family ties. And this patter of gender segregation can still be seen in the Manyeruke’s Salvation Army congregation, where women generally sit with other women and men with men, not with their spouses, as we see Hellenah and Machanic here at their all-night prayer meeting.

Filming a public political meeting in the City of Mutare in 2011, largely with urban middle class Zimbabweans, that was also the case. Men and women sat separately, not with their spouses. So, the more intimate kind of partnership in marriage Baba and Hellenah are developing, and Jonathan and Melynda learning, takes innovative mentoring and counseling. And it takes others stepping in to care and help where relatives might otherwise have been counted on. Before Jonathan’s mother died, he explains with deep feeling, she made a point of explicitly turning her son over to Baba Manyeruke, so Jonathan now considers himself Machanic and Hellenah’s child.

Recognizing that changes in marriage to a more “companionate” model can take generations to firmly take root, it is interesting to see how much Machanic and Hellenah’s son, Emmanuel (aka Guspy Warrior, his stage name), carries forward this remodeling of marriage in his own popular urban dance hall music. His songs about loving your spouse, and about forgiveness and reconciliation between husband and wife in his song “Sorry!”, inspired by a fight between him and his wife Mandy, strike such a cord in listeners that, as Mandy reports, they routinely experience have people coming up to them in public spaces, like grocery stores, to thank him for this song or that which helped save their marriage.

In the United States the long-term process of the emergence of companionate marriages can be tracked by noting the findings of historian Helen Horowitz in her book Rereading Sex. She notes that romantic love came to be seen as an important part of marriage in the US only in the 1830s and 1840s, and then specifically among the white professional middle class in New York City at the time. The movement to companionate marriage is often carried by the professional middle-class who typically move away from family networks, first, for education and then for professional job opportunities. It tends not to develop in rural communities, or among working-class folks, who tend to stay more connected in mutual dependence to extended family relationships even as they follow relatives in chain migration to cities where they rely on each other for mutual support.

Companionate marriage is also less apt to develop among those raised within family-based business where they find their livelihoods, or among the propertied upper-class or aristocracy, where marriages may be engineered for extended-family politics or inheritance concerns, and mistresses are accepted as a normal reality of married life. Five generations after Horowitz notes the initial emergence of romantic love in marriage in the United States, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Post-World War Two economic boom had rapidly expanded the professional middle-class, these changes found expression in the “sexual revolution” and “women’s liberation” movement of the day, and in the tsunami of changes in gender and sexuality during which, for example, most elite colleges went from being single-sex to co-ed institutions within a single decade. (This is also a period when divorce rates sky-rocketed in the United States, making it lead the world by far in divorce, which it still does, even after those sky-rocketing rates in the 1970s declined some.)

But, again, this tsunami of social change was carried mainly by the professional middle-class, not working-class Americans, or those in small family-based businesses, which became clear in my research and filming in a fundamentalist Baptist “Moral Majority” church then at the forefront of New Right conservatism sweeping American politics in the 1980s. Extended-family ties were the building blocks of that fundamentalist church on the outskirts of Worcester, Massachusetts. Men and women routinely gathered separately for men’s Saturday Bible study, for example. I remember one woman member frankly explaining to me that her idea of a “husband” was simply, “find one and see what you can get from him.” She was quite candidly confessing this, I believe, because an important part of the biblically based preaching and ministry in her church, and other fundamentalist churches like it at the time, was to shape men to play more active, responsible roles in family life, something relatively new to them. Such churches were, then, part of larger tidal changes in family life in post-World War Two America.

For a glimpse into another socially conservative area in American life during that same era, AIDS spread to white working-class communities in Appalachian West Virginia mainly by men truck drivers who had sex with male prostitutes on the road and then went back to their families, where sex generally wasn’t seen as an important part of marriage. (Abraham Verghese, My Own Country.) Sexual intimacy as a vehicle for romantic love was not an important part of life, and, therefore, not part of one’s intimate self, or one’s identity, as it has increasingly become in more liberal quarters of American life. Seeing same-sex practices as part of one’s very identity took longer to become established in rural and working-class America. The term “homosexual” didn’t emerge until the end of the 19th century. Where life is organized into men’s and women’s worlds, and heterosexual marriage and procreation is seen as necessary for sustaining such communities, is it not understandable that the very idea of homosexual identity and same-sex marriage might be seen to destabilize, even threaten, family life as it is so lived. (For more on understanding such differences over homosexuality now threatening to divide branches of the world church, see my essay “What Liberal Delusions About Conservatism Teach” online here.)

In all these instances of church growth fueled by urbanization, as people reach out and provide relationships of support and mentorship to one another, often helping them reshape marriages to adapt to city life without extended family relationships present around them, they, nevertheless, often anchor the norms and definitions of these relationships in elements of traditional culture, especially family roles (even though those roles are changed and adapted to the new urban context). So, Machanic is Baba (“Father”) to this younger generation. And Machanic and Hellenah find that their new neighbors in Chitungwiza, who helped them meet all kinds of needs as they built their own house next door, were more like “relatives to us,” as Hellenah points out.

And notice that Machanic and Hellenah’s granddaughter, Anesu, finds her grandfather’s song Usarike, or Kukudzu Vakuru (“Respect the Elders”) one that really impacted her life, helping her find a moral compass for life. After her father died, she explains, and her mother was out working, she was home alone a lot. (Talk about conditions ripe for anomie or normlessness.) “I never knew how to respect my elders,” Anesu continues, “and how to perform some good morals. But those lyrics in that song made me realize I was treading on the wrong path.” The song urges young people to respect their elders. “You’ll have a good journey . . .” if you do, it affirms.

“It challenged me to respect everyone,” Anesu explains, “even a stranger.” Because, as she continues, if he or she’s older, “I consider him my elder brother, my elder sister, my father, my mom, my grandmother, and . . .” She smiles. In these ways, for Anesu, the moral anchor for her relationships with strangers on the city streets, is the traditional norm of eldership in family/village relationships as expressed in her grandfather’s song.

In this regard, it should be noted that new migrants to the city bring with them, and continue to live out, to varying degrees, the culture that formed them in rural life—family obligations, oral culture story-telling, gender segregation, etc.—as well as relationships they still carry. For Dwight L. Moody, he was given work in Boston at an uncle’s shoe store, for example (whom he later had issues with). And when Machanic first arrived in Gweru, as a teenager, after walking for a day-and-a-half to get there, he was picking through garbage bins for food that morning. A man saw him and reached out offering to buy him a meal. Upon asking Machanic “Who’s your father, and who’s your mother?”, he discovered he was related to Machanic’s mother. He gave Machanic a place to stay in his home and helped him find work.

In these ways, Baba Manyeruke’s story, including the popular embrace of his music, is, in part, a classic story of urbanization and the growth of new kinds of church communities and church work in those new contexts. In that respect, his story may hold insights into similar developments at other moments of church history in the more distant past, just as much-esteemed church historian Andrew Walls’ understandings of the second century church were invaluably enriched by his watching similar spiritual developments happening around him in Sierra Leone in 1959.

(Another biographical note: Machanic’s work history is much more involved than told in our film. After doing gardening and household work for three years for one white family, he worked for three years helping build the road from Gweru to Harare (aka Gwelo and Salisbury in that Rhodesian period) and only then got the job with the European family that brought him to Harare. Much greater details about his life and music can be found in Bornwell Choga’s biography, originally in Shona, and now in translation.)

The Prominence of Spiritual Healing (cont’d)

Regarding Madhimoni, it is interesting to note in Machanic’s lyrics to that song, he begins by describing Legion as a man possessed by “evil spirits” (nemashavi in Shona, a reality normally referred to locally). Then, in the chorus, he has people sing “madhimoni”, the Shona version of the English word “demons.”  And in repeats of the opening verse, Machanic sings that Legion is possessed,  first, by nemashavi and in the repeated line, madhimoni. Thereby he is helping ground the biblical story as read in English, using the term demons, in the realities of local Shona life where evil spirits, or nemashavi, would be spoken of.

Work for my African Christianity Rising documentary film series, exploring the sources and directions of Christianity’s explosive growth in both Ghana and Zimbabwe, showed me that a major source for that explosive growth were creative ministries addressing Africans’ concerns about spiritual powers affecting their lives. For example, deliverance ministry—diagnosing the delivering people from spiritual powers afflicting them—was the fastest growing ministry in Ghana at the time in the 1990s, and was spread across all denominations—Presbyterian, Anglican, Methodist, et al. In Zimbabwe, all-night worship, traditionally known as pungwe, where spiritual powers manifested and were addressed, had been embraced by virtually all denominations, thereby serving as another powerful vehicle for rooting Christianity in local cultures.

In fact, the leading historian of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, Professor John Kurewa, notes that his parents’ generation of Zimbabwean Methodists saw the beginnings of their church, not when American missionaries built churches, schools and hospitals there at the end of the 19th century. Instead, they saw it beginning only in 1918, when a miraculous healing took place in a Congregational church revival in eastern Zimbabwe, sparking a revival which sent witnesses out across the surrounding countryside where traditional all-night worship broke out and flooded the land. For Kurewa’s parents generation, he notes, that was what marked the beginnings of their beloved Methodist Church!  (John Kurewa, The Church in Mission: A Short History of the United Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, 1897-1997)  Nevertheless, over three generations later, at the beginning of the 21^st century, Zimbabwean United Methodists felt it necessary to hide such practices of spiritual warfare from their American partners in church work, even though they were essential to their identity as church. As far as the continuing outlook of church leaders in the West toward such realities are concerned, a professor at Duke Divinity School, one of the United Methodists’ leading theological schools, who reviewed my African Christianity Rising documentary series in Christian Century, quite candidly told me, “I don’t know what to make of all the scenes of deliverance ministry or exorcisms in your films. All I know is that if Jesus carried a business card, it would have had `exorcist’ on it.” 

Other Songs Contributing to the Moral Compass of Modern Life

Sexual Morality — Josefa

Other needs that Machanic Manyeruke’s most popular songs tended to address when he became a “superstar,” as producer Bothwell Nyamhondera put it, were those contributing to setting important elements of a moral compass for modern city life. His song Josefa, about the Old Testament character Joseph’s resisting the advances of Potiphar’s wife, is, perhaps, the most prominent of those. Musician/producer Mono Mukundu says it’s his favorite because it addresses a challenge and temptation so prominent among musicians themselves—“chasing us around like our shadows,” as Mono puts it. The explicitness of its recurring chorus makes its moral message abundantly clear: “Who would do what he did, Lord? Who would do what Joseph did?”

Another theme addressing the moral compass of life is perhaps less explicit, but more pervasive, as well. That is: the need to forgive. That is carried in the story of Joseph Machanic continues to follow, and identify with, in his song Josefa Wavemambo (“Joseph is now King”) telling the story of Joseph being sold into slavery by his brothers, only to rise in the Pharoah’s house, as second in command to Potiphar. When years later his brothers come to the Pharoah seeking food during a famine, and meet Joseph, yet don’t recognize, him, he forgives them and extends a helping hand to them. Machanic admits that in that song he identifies with Joseph, because of his own brothers not caring for him after his father died, and even betraying him by selling off the goat and cow his father left him to pay for his schooling. Machanic forgave his brothers and went on, as Hellenah points out, to care for their children, and pay for their education. This is just like Joseph did, in the account in Genesis 50:15-21, when he breaks into tears when his brothers throw themselves down in front of him begging for forgiveness and offering to be his slaves. Joseph cries, forgives them, and pledges to provide for them and their children.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the centerpiece of several of Machanic’s songs, from Kuregerera—Shoko RaMwari (“Forgiveness—the Word of God”) on his album Kubva Muguruva  (2013) with its recurring chorus: “Regereranai! Regereranai!” (“Forgive each other! Forgive each other!”), to “Baba, Ndiregerereiwo”, (“Father, Please Forgive Me”), on the album we filmed him recording in 2018 and which he performed onstage at the Hope for Zimbabwe concert, as a prelude to welcoming his son, Guspy Warrior. Zimbabweans’ ongoing connections with extended families, even as they move and live more apart, can be a source of recurring and persistent conflicts that challenge them. Hence the theme of the Hope for Zimbabwe Concert of “family unity” as a basis for peace in the nation. Machanic’s bass guitarist and vocalist, Tamuka, cites as some of the important things he learned from Baba Manyeruke’s counseling, when he advised him how to handle conflicts within his wider family after his father died and some relatives were manipulating things in their favor.

And Anesu, Machanic and Hellenah’s granddaughter, testifies that she found the Hope for Zimbabwe concert “challenging,” but in the end, helpful. “At the concert,” she says, “I learned a lot, about how to maintain our relationships back at home with our families.” This is a more powerful lesson than viewers of the film would realize, given part of Anesu’s story regarding her father’s death that we didn’t have time to tell in the film itself. It turns out he was killed, so the family believes, in a ritual killing by members of his wider extended family. Issues of property and inheritance were presumably involved. So, for Anesu to say she learned a lot from the concert about maintaining “our relationship back home with our families,” with songs like “Father, Please Forgive Me” being performed, is a powerful statement. In his most recent CD released in 2020, Baba Manyeruke has produced yet another song focusing on the theme of forgiveness, recognizing its fundamental importance in the practical realm of human relationships, and its centrality in Christian theology.

Moral Uplift

Finally, some of Machanic’s popular songs simply serve to uplift the collective spirit of the Zimbabwe people, songs like Makorokoto. It simply calls out to all listeners—perhaps singing along, or dancing with—“Congratulations! Congratulations! . . . You’ve done well. You’ve done well.” I am told it is a song often performed at graduation ceremonies, weddings and other events of celebration.