Music in Malawi

The small African country of Malawi – it’s about half the size of the UK – has loomed large for me for years. Several people in my life had visited or lived there and I loved hearing about it. My introduction to Malawian music came from The Very Best, the trio that Esau Mwamwaya formed in London with Sweden’s Johan Hugo and France’s Etienne Tron. Their debut, Warm Heart of Africa (2009), is a joyful, multilayered blast of electronics, eclectic instrumentation and traditional rhythms alongside globally conscious guest stars like M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig.

Ever since, I’ve been attuned to the music of the country, noting with pleasure the success of the Malawi Mouse Boys, Faith Mussa, Gasper Nali, Lazarus, the Zomba Prison Project and, most recently, Madalitso Band. When talking about Malawi, one place kept getting mentioned again and again: Lake of Stars. This music festival, on the shores of Lake Malawi, has an almost mythical reputation for breaking local bands onto the world stage. I dreamt about going, but it was always on the ‘one day’ list. Then, last year, I received an unexpected message. ‘Do I want to come to Malawi to write about the festival?’ Which, by the way, was happening the following month. I had to change many plans. Still, before I knew it, I was on Sani Beach near Nkhotakota, sipping Kuche Kuche beer and talking with Mr Mwamwaya himself, after his performance on the main stage with singer-songwriter Lazarus Chigwandali. The Very Best (now a duo of Mwamwaya and Hugo) have been busy over the last couple of years working on what will be a new album, probably due in 2026. It has, Johan tells me later, a mix of “really dark and atmospheric” music with upbeat Afropop. Malawian artists like Onesimus, Sonye, KIM of Diamonds and Lazarus (who has been adopted into the collective of The Very Best in recent years) are all over it.

For Esau, the highlight has been the recording location: Conforzi Lake House in Mangochi, southern Malawi. “It’s got a very good vibe, you know? You wake up to see the sunrise and the lake in front of you.” Lake Malawi, the ninth-largest lake in the world (by area), spans almost the whole eastern border of the country. “Malawi is the place to be,” he opines, “Malawi is so beautiful. We’ve got beautiful mountains, beautiful national parks. We’ve got a beautiful lake. You can come and taste our beautiful chambo.”

“Chambo or chamba?” I tease – it’s a well-known joke that the famed chambo fish can easily be mixed up with the slang name for cannabis, ‘chamba’. But what about the music scene? “We are going towards the right direction. There’s a lot of collaborations, both local and international. Unlike ten to 15 years ago, a lot of Malawians can travel outside Malawi and perform.” That said, as I write, Trump’s regime is threatening further restrictions on Malawians travelling to the US.

What about for Lazarus, whose impassioned singing and playing of the ‘banjo’ – often made using an old oil can as the resonator and typically with just three or four strings – has earned him worldwide acclaim? As a man with albinism, Lazarus’s life is constantly under threat from those who want to harvest his body parts for ‘traditional’ medicines. Since Esau and Johan have helped him find a platform, he has been fighting for the rights of albinos. Has he seen any change come from his work? Esau translates his reply: “He says there’s a huge difference. Now, people are beginning to understand that these myths and conspiracies about people with albinism are not true. Now there are less killings of people with albinism. You still hear about that happening every once in a while, but before we would hear about that happening on an almost everyday basis.”

I risk painting too rosy a picture of Malawi. It’s been identified as the fourth poorest country in the world, and even since my visit, the strength of their currency, the Kwacha, has plummeted. Cuts in the international development budgets of First World nations are likely to be devastating. After the festival, I visited the Dzaleka refugee camp where first, second and even third generation refugees from the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are trapped, stateless and in limbo without any real hope for the future. It’s a stark contrast to the sumptuous safari lodges, which are all that many tourists see of Malawi, even if these lodges have a good reputation for conservation and working with local communities.

The Lake of Stars is, undoubtedly, a good thing. Newly returned after a four-year, COVID-19-enhanced gap and now entirely managed by a Malawian team, it has done wonders in putting the country on the map for music fans and backpackers alike. This year’s event has been announced for October. Sharmila Elias, the festival’s quietly confident director, tells me they want to focus on roots music this time round.

Malawi is known for its travelling banjo bands (and, in rarer cases like Lazarus, solo performers) who walk the streets of its capital Lilongwe or one of the other urban centres, homemade instruments in hand, hoping to be stopped with a request to play in exchange for some small change. These men – it is always men – might supplement another job or, if they are lucky, eke out a living entirely by performing a distinct type of local music influenced by gospel, reggae or their folk traditions.

“When I was little, we never had fences and gates at our homes,” Sharmila remembers, “so these musicians used to just come, with their guitars made from oil cans, and play these wonderful songs for us in exchange for a few tambalas [Malawian pennies]”. 2024’s festival introduced me to the enjoyable Galang’ombe Boys Band, and we can expect more like that this year, as well as opportunities to create our own instruments from waste.

Just as important as the banjo bands in Malawi’s culture are the tribal dances and their associated music. “In Malawi, traditional music isn’t really a genre per se,” explains Sharmila. “We can say nyimbo zachin’nkhalidwe, which means ‘cultural music’ [in Chichewa], but it is more the case that we name each dance, and the music is a part of that dance. Everything has a purpose; it’s not just for entertainment. In most cases, it’s ceremonial, it’s ritual. It’s to celebrate, to commemorate, to unite. For instance, in the case of manganje, this marks the initiation of a boy child to manhood.” Manganje, in its most orthodox form, is the dance and music that accompanies the all-night gatherings a boy from the Yao people will attend as part of his jando (coming-of-age) ceremony. However, over the years, manganje has come to be performed secularly as entertainment. While the Yao people only make up around 13% of Malawi’s population (according to the 2018 national census; the majority are Chewa), manganje is increasingly embraced as a Malawian national heritage. Its distinctive rhythm is often described as ‘champweteka n’chimanga’ – a phrase that literally refers to pounding corn but also phonetically matches the manganje beat – and is even used by Malawian hip-hop/electronic producers to distinguish their style from that of their neighbours.

Malawi’s best-known tribal dance is the Chewa’s gule wamkulu, or ‘great dance’. “It’s a spiritual dance performed during funerals, weddings, initiation ceremonies,” says Sharmila. “The dancers go into a trance-like state, using alcohol or herbs. It is believed they leave their human bodies dancing away here on Earth. Apparently, a spirit takes over their body, and they were shape-shifters who became an animal or someone else. They carve these dramatic masks to depict that shape-shifting.”

One of Lake of Stars 2025’s headliners will be homecoming heroes, Madalitso Band. If one Malawian act can be said to have captured the contemporary zeitgeist on the international world music circuit, the quiet duo of Yosefe Kalekeni and Yobu Maligwa are it. These unlikely stars have wowed crowds at the Roskilde, Jazz à Vienne and WOMAD festivals and are due to play Glastonbury this year.

Despite the democratisation of global music via the internet, the Malawian musicians who make it abroad inevitably do so with the patronage of an enthusiastic Western supporter. Thus it was for Yosefe and Yobu, who knew expat British singer-songwriter Neil Nayar in Lilongwe. Nayar nominated them to play at 2017’s Sauti Za Busara festival in Zanzibar, but admits he was surprised when they were selected over some of the more polished acts he had also submitted. From there, things grew and grew.

I ask Yosefe, who plays banjo (in his case, four strings attached to a guitar body), why he thinks they have cut through where similar banjo bands haven’t. Neil translates his reply: “He says it’s the actual sound they create and the way they have developed it. There’s something cool about their sound. And they’ve found these unusual opportunities, like meeting me and being invited to Zanzibar, which you can say is down to Mulungu [God].” How would you describe Yosefe’s guitar style? “It’s hard to explain,” says Neil. “His is a local tuning, his own tuning to some extent. He picks out all the melodies, the little guitar riffs that are the distinguishing feature of the songs. I recognise every song primarily from the guitar riff.” Then there is the small foot drum he bangs with his heel, giving an insistent, rhythmic pulse, and making me worry about the long-term effects of his hunched posture. I’m assured he’s fine!

Yobu sings lead vocals and thwacks a babatoni – the huge, one-stringed, almost two-metre long, handmade slide bass that he plays across his lap. It’s an instrument that’s had a resurgence in Malawi in recent years. What drew Yobu to it? “When they first met and started the band in 2002, Yosefe was already playing the guitar, but Yobu didn’t have an instrument,” Neil explains. “Yobu had to find an instrument that would complement the guitar well.” In the spirit of improvisation, Yobu uses an old bit of plumbing pipe as a plectrum and a small medicine bottle as a slide.

Do they make traditional music? “It’s a difficult one,” Neil considers. “The idea is to use all your creativity when you’re on those instruments. There is inevitably a ton of traditional in there, because, in Malawi, the biggest traditions that go back from generation to generation are the drumming and the dancing. It’s a huge influence, but it’s hard to distinguish which parts of the music are ‘traditional’. It isn’t an intentional thing. It’s just part of who they are.”

Madalitso Band’s new album, Ma Gitala (The Guitars), promises to explore for the first time “the possibilities of the studio” as opposed to a ‘live’ recording. Don’t expect a radical departure: this is still the Madalitso Band that their audience knows and loves. But there are a few diversions – a bit of sansi (thumb piano) on one number, and, most compellingly, an unexpected appearance by the saxophone of American ethnomusicologist Rick Deja.

Another notable babatoni player is Gasper Nali, whose acoustic folk music first gained worldwide attention through an online video. In 2010, he lived on the lakeside in Nkhata Bay, northern Malawi, where he frequently busked on the beach. At 2.7 metres, Gasper’s specially adapted babatoni is bigger even than Yobu’s. With his bassy babatoni zizzing away and an adamant kick drum banging out accompaniment, he sang his catchy earworm, ‘Abale Ndikuwuzeni’. It’s actually a cautionary tale about declining moral standards, but you wouldn’t know it – it sounds like a joyous celebration! A passing tourist, Anders Olsson, filmed his performance and posted it online, where it took off. Mattias Stålnacke, a Swedish musician living in the area, saw this and got in touch with Gasper: “This has millions of views,” he told him. “You need to record something!” He did, and it worked: Gasper now performs globally and has just released his third album, Chule Chule Iwe, on Mattias’ Spare Dog Records. On it, he works in a trio, with Mattias’ electric guitars adding some tasty pan-African licks and Malawian-born, Scotland-based musician Luhangah on percussion. The title-track, translating as ‘Hey You, Frog!’ is Gasper’s version of a children’s nursery rhyme, whimsical on the surface but revealing about the hardship faced by many in the country: ‘You frog, you! / I sent you for water / You brought me mud!’

You would be forgiven at this point for thinking that Malawian music was all banjos, babatonis and drums, but Patrick Chimbewa puts paid to that idea. Unlike the aforementioned performers, he’s yet to get much recognition outside of Africa. Rather than moving to a city, Patrick has chosen to stay in the tiny village of Chidzaye in the Ntchisi region. From there, he supports his family both as a musician and as an instrument maker. We meet at Lake of Stars, where he is playing with theatrical performance troupe Tamba Africa and alongside Zimbabwe’s Nasibo, but he thinks that to truly understand his music, I would be best to visit him in the village.

A bumpy four-by-four ride up a steep dirt track, and we’re soon warmly received in Patrick’s small, solid home and introduced to his student and bandmate, Osiwini Clifford. Hanging from the walls are Patrick’s hand-crafted instruments, beautifully made from gourds. Patrick’s primary instrument is one of his inventions, the sansiba. It is a combination of a sansi, a small metal thumb piano inside a calabash gourd, and a badza, the traditional kazoo that is again made from a gourd, this time with a spider’s web or a bit of plastic placed inside as a membrane to create a unique buzzing noise when blown. He and Osiwini (playing a normal sansi) perform together for us, Patrick leading the singing on a song from the gule wamkulu tradition (“the only dance that overseas people get interested in”, he notes ruefully). Then he changes instrument to a one-stringed fiddle, the kaligo (or more accurately the kaligoba, as he has attached a badza). Written across the neck are the words ‘HANDLE WITH CARE’. “This is special for me; no one else can play it,” Patrick laughs. Accompanied by Osiwini on djembé, he sings a self-composed number about visiting his grandmother to better understand his heritage.

Patrick has been recording at the beautiful Ntchisi Forest Lodge with London-based musician Natcyet Waliki (Sons of Kemet, Nok Cultural Ensemble) for a solo EP. This will be called Ulinayo Nthawi (You Have Time) and released on Natcyet’s new label in July. Alongside this, he has been working on a release with his regular four-piece band, accompanied and produced by acclaimed Malawian guitarist Erik Paliani. “We’re very satisfied with the work,” he tells me, “but the release date is not yet confirmed.” I do hope these new recordings help Patrick get the wider recognition he deserves.

I can see why Patrick wanted me to come to Chidzaye. It is heartening to see that off-the-map, tucked away in a village without even a Wikipedia entry to its name, folk music still has a place in day-to-day life. Before we go, Matt and I are introduced to Patrick’s mother, who beams at her son’s achievements. Patrick inherited his musicianship from his grandfather, another sansi player. He went on to study with Charles Chavalamangwere, but his mother initially told him to focus his attention on more lucrative studies. He’s glad he persisted and relieved he has been able to make a living.

So am I. Patrick Chimbewa is the real deal. He’s part of a living heritage; making accessible, relevant music with ancient roots. Malawi is known as ‘the warm heart of Africa’. In this moment, I feel that the heart of Malawi is right here.