Music is a funny thing. It can express emotions from joy to sorrow to rage to contentment, and it can also tell stories of love, war, death, and birth. Some songs are immortal, and many are products of their time that will fall by the wayside. This brings us to this piece of history I stumbled across during my latest visit to Peru to see my wife.
A take on the traditional British tune "It's a Long Way to Tipperary," this song called "It's a Long Way to Mukumbura" was composed by a guy named Mike Westcott and a band called Leprechaun in 1977, as the Rhodesian Bush War was nearing its conclusion in 1979. The following year, the British transformed the unrecognized state of Rhodesia into modern Zimbabwe.
The Bush War began in 1965 during the era of decolonization, as the British ceded majority rule to its African colonies as independent countries. Rhodesia, which was governed by its white minority, unilaterally declared independence out of self-preservation.
For the next 15 years, the Rhodesian Security Forces battled Chinese and Soviet-backed rebels under Zimbabwe's eventual dictator Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo before the Rhodesian government lost support from South Africa and was forced to enter peace talks with the rebels in 1979.
As a result, "It's a Long Way to Mukumbura" is dense with Rhodesian/South African slang and military jargon, featuring a comedic interlude poking fun at the various branches of Rhodesian Security Forces with an almost Pythonesque humor. For instance, a mortar commander screams, "ACTION! DISARM IT AGAIN!," as a different voice whines, "They're so loud," which can be interpreted as the mortars themselves or the officers. A member of the Grey's Scouts, a mounted unit, has to be reminded of which way to sit on the horse. Two members of the Signals Corps end up confusing themselves over their designations.
The existence of Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe is still within living memory for a lot of people, yet we can find relatively little about Mr. Westcott and Leprechaun, other than that they had a couple of other songs released in 1977, and Westcott himself has a Facebook page that appears to have been inactive since 2018, suggesting he might still be alive today.
This is not a defense of Rhodesia or colonization, but the song itself is fascinating for its historical value (plus it's catchy). It is easy to study history as remembering names, dates, places, and facts without ever really remembering that these were real people experiencing real events, sometimes even while your parents were living at the same time.
It's the same way you can forget that Mikhail Gorbachev only just passed away a couple of years ago in 2022, and he was once the leader of the Soviet Union, our biggest adversary for about 50 years.
But that's the thing, too: the Soviet Union left a huge mark on history, while Rhodesia is a footnote in the history of Africa since decolonization. Tipperary is still a city in Ireland even if it hasn't been under British rule for a hundred years, but no modern map contains Salisbury, just Harare.
It's a long way to Mukumbura, but it feels a lot longer than Tipperary.
