It’s going to be bigger, better

After a sterling event last year, Sand Music Festival returns this year, promising an even bigger and better carnival. But before the festival in October, the festival will host a Busy Signal show on September 3 in Lilongwe. Chill engages Sand Festival director Lucius Banda on this and other issues.

Q

: As Sand Festival, you are bringing back Jamaican musician Busy Signal for a performance end of August. Why?

A

: Busy Signal is the artist who came here and performed for three hours and impressed everybody who came. But we realise that Sand Festival and Impakt Events are not there for the few rich people who can afford to travel to the lake for the festival; it is there for that young child in Chilinde and for that young girl in Are 18 who could not raise enough money to travel to Salima and pay the amount for the festival. You might remember that I have a background for being a soldier of the poor, and whenever I am involved in an initiative, I always think of the have nots and how they can be accorded such kind of entertainment. We want Busy to come so that the young man can gather his K10 000 to come and watch Busy and say I watched Busy live. That is the whole idea.

Q

: That aside, what is the whole essence of the Busy Signal show?

A: Well, when Busy comes, this is going to be a fundraising show for the Sand Festival. As you can see this year, a number of festivals are folding and some are down-scaling. We don’t want to join that bandwagon, we want to be a festival that is there—whether the economy is fine or not. So, to achieve that, we need to hold fundraising activities and Busy is coming here to help us raise funds to make to make the Sand Music Festival great.

Q

: Now that you have talked about the festival, what should people expect this year?

A

: For the Sand Festival, there are a number of artists that we are talking to. The intention of Sand Festival is that Malawi needs to have a festival which we can identify with and say, ‘this is a Malawian festival, created by Malawians for Malawians’. That is why we put up Sand Festival.

Q

: Last year’s festival was big, how do you intend to surpass those levels this year?

A

: It’s getting bigger because last year, we had one big international artist who performed on Saturday. But this year, we have an international artist on Friday, an international artist on Saturday and another international artist on Sunday. What we are trying to achieve is we want this to be a three-day festival, not just people coming to watch the international artist and leaving. We feel we will achieve nothing if people just come for that one artist because our intention is to expose Malawian talent. Now since Malawians would like to see a big international artist for them to be motivated to watch the other artists, we need to have big artists performing on each of the festival’s days. We have a lot of young artists doing really well such as Theo Thomson, Lulu, Skeffa and Black Missionaries.

Q

: Do you think festivals are doing enough in uplifting local talent?

A

: I think they are going enough. I am an example of someone who has benefitted from performing at a local festival. There was a time I performed at Lake of Stars, and there was a man who works for the Nottingham City Council. I was invited to perform at the Splendour Festival in Nottingham because this man saw me performing at the lake of Stars. So, it does benefit us. People who come to the festivals are not your ordinary patrons, these are people who come from all over the world. And even, locally, these are not the usual people that we have at our shows. So, when they see us perform at the festival and they are impressed, it means that we win new fans. But it is a long term thing, people might not understand it instantly, that is why we insist that the festival has to go on because that is our contribution as Sand Festival.

Q

: What is the long term vision of Sand Festival?

A

: Our model is the Cape Town Jazz Festival which has been going on for a really long time. It doesn’t need advertising, everyone knows that it is always there. You know, life has different dimensions, there are sad times and happy times. Because we have a lot of problems that are stressing us, economically and otherwise, we tend to concentrate on those problems. But entertainment does help a lot in life. And we come from an entertainment world where we are saying, we need to provide good entertainment to the Malawian nation because there have a lot of problems to think about. So, once in a while, for three days straight, they should lose themselves in some really classy entertainment.

Q

: You have raised issues about the lack of corporate support, are you still in the same quagmire?

A

: Not as much as it should have been, but we are getting there slowly. Because companies are now realising the need to support the festivals and I feel we will start benefitting. It’s a wake-up call for the companies to know that if they do not participate, they are just being primitive. I have performed in South Africa and Germany where you do not have to go and ask a company for sponsorship. The companies just come, and when they see that you are using their product, they just come in and donate. It’s immoral for fuel companies, for instance, to see that they have sold abnormal volumes of fuel on a festival weekend and not question what has triggered that. Any normal person would question why and see that there was an event which drove their sales and if they are sensible enough, partner the organisers so that we have a win-win situation. When you benefit, it is good to be responsible and make sure you contribute. n