Marrabenta book

Marrabenta is one of the main genres of local popular music, when it comes to music produced in an urban context and aimed at consumption by the general public. It is characterized as a style of light music resulting from the mixture of different rhythms originating from the south of Mozambique, being performed on stages and accompanied by conventional instruments of contemporary popular music, such as drums, bass, electric guitars, etc. popularity is such that it has become common for people to refer to it to define the country itself as a whole, with statements such as “Mozambique is the country of Marrabenta”.

The book is, according to its authors, an academic advocacy for the preservation of a musical and artistic heritage that qualifies the country. According to Silva Dunduro (director of ARPAC*), it serves to contribute to the literary collection on Mozambican music and propose to the family of Mozambican scientists to discuss, systematize and disseminate their cultural heritage in an endogenous way.
The book comprises five articles signed, all of them, by ARPAC researchers: João Vilanculo, Marílio Wane, Hortêncio Langa, Vitor Chibanga and Agnelo Navaia. (It should be noted that, posthumously, the researchers João Vilanculo and Hortêncio Langa signed. Therefore, the book is dedicated to them). The essayists of “ Marrabenta! A Cultural Heritage of Mozambique ” share the various tones through which Marrabenta penetrates and lets itself be influenced to become a musical genre that may or may not unite Mozambicans, all derived from the perspective and filters of the reader and the connoisseur or in this genre musical.

« Marrabenta! A Mozambican Cultural Heritage », is a work, with a focus on Mozambican ethnomusicology, thus fulfilling one of the objectives of the Marimba Project.