…hey, for those of you who don´t know – Malawi is still my first home as I grew up there and resided in the cultural capitol of Blantyre for my high school and first music years.
I can tell you that Malawi is a very different sort of place, you won´t believe all the mad things that happened to me over the years… I´ll never forget this time there was a gig there at a backpackers place called Doogles it was one of the first gigs I did with the Sangalala band and we had an equipment failure so we told the crowd to wait one more hour and jumped in the back of a van to go chase down a power amp. After thirty minutes of careening around between the broken roads and tight shacks of mbayani we get to the house of a promoter who hires equipment. The band fidget outside while I go in to seek help..its early in the rainy season on a clear damp night with the rich township smells of earth and food, and awful beer tickling your nostrils.
The guy is a bit sleepy and doesn´t understand what I am getting at and I struggle to explain the situation and also the urgency (ref the waiting audience back in doogles). Unfortunately for the boys there is a nest of linthumbo (biting ants) on the roadside, and while they are all waiting they begin to feel them biting on the inside of their trousers..I decide at this point that the only way to explain the situation is to show him the band waiting outside (who were well known as musicians)…but when I lead the man outside and point, as if to say..´see, I am in a band, we need an amp´………..I only see all five band members hopping madly up and down in the road with their trousers below their knees. I still can´t forget the look on his face of almost superstitious dread ´what do you want from me?…