Kondwani Kamiyala

By LEVI KABWATO, The Daily Times - Sunday, July 29, 2007 http://www.sundaytimes.bppmw.com/article.asp?ArticleID=60 Much has been said and written on Malawian art – music, writing, theatre, fine art and even film. The arts industry has produced phenomenal talent, from Proffessor David Rubadiri to Maria Chidzanja-Nkhoma to Wambali Mkandawire to Shemu Joya. But, there seems to be something that is choking the complete evolution of the arts in Malawi. LEVI KABWATO interrogates the arts space in Part 1 of this two-part series. A FEW weeks ago I received an email from a colleague and friend of mine Kondwani Kamiyala. It was an invitation to be part of a young writers’ workshop due to be launched soon. The workshop, the email informed me, would be held once a month and would have, as its main thrust, the activity of reading each other’s work, constructively critiquing it for purposes of generally moulding participants into better artists – poets and prose writers. I found it to be a particula...

A quake The earth shakes and breaks The mausoleum crumbles A flywhisk, that Stetson hat and three piece Walk out, to see a new day This Figure, this poem can’t like I have to hide it Hide it even from His zealots The zealots that outlived The Despot for Life Let me not face three and half Years in gaol, where the poet Rot, and rot, and rot for lines These zealots thought against The Life Despot The Despot for Life shall faint I have my liberty, to play Words around, literally Of his coming back to life Yet, nothing of that Shall The Figure see The miniskirts down Victoria Avenue The trousers, that make geography fun? What of my locksied hair on a newspaper column Will This Figure wave the flywhisk At His born-frees Dancing like Mbumba for their nkhoswe Down the valley, The Figure to his abode walks Now a crèche, now a busy assembly Now home for some drunk, Inebriated with alcoholic stupour brewed in ’65 Truth comes home to roost Of dogs, quarelling for nothing Throat-tearing bitches th...

First published in The Nation, August 29, 2007 Artists are national politicians. They speak for all people—and all is all is all. But when artists go into politics, do they remain national politicians? Not necessarily. They even lose touch with the masses, the sources of art. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MUSICIAN Lucius Banda had a show the other night, weeks after he was stripped of his parliamentary seat following a conviction for ‘uttering a false document and giving false information to a person employed in the public service’. Hundreds braved the biting cold of Limbe to watch him perform. It was not songs from his latest Cell 51 Maximum album that gripped my attention. Neither was it the old songs like Mabala that struck my attention. I was rather touched at how much the patrons crammed the dancefloor when Banda played the UDF Boma song. It was difficult to tell if they were igno...