City of Stars? Think again!

Jah people, a week of dripping cold weather looks cocksure to transport us into yet another season of scorching sunshine when Lake Malawi offers a

 memorable escape.  For party makers, the mention of summer sun and the continent’s third  largest fresh water body conjure up images of annual festivals that have

 come to represent the musical side of the treasure missionary explorer Scot  rightly christened ‘Lake of Stars’.

 This is why it looks like misplaced and flawed craftsmanship that UK-born  Will Jameson has branded Lilongwe a ‘City of Stars’ since it will host a

 fiesta commemorating the 10th anniversary of the country’s most acclaimed  fest—the Lake of Stars Arts Festival which disappeared two years ago.

 Ten years is a feat for a fiesta which began as small as a mustard seed at  Chintheche Inn in Nkhata Bay in 2003 and sprouted as big as a baobab tree by

 the time it relocated to the vast sand spreads of Sunbird Nkopola Lodge in  Mangochi about five years ago. In the said decade, babies have become boys

 and girls. Even the festival has been to every Sunbird hotel that matters on  the palm-fringed shores of the glittering lake, including Livingstonia Beach

 at Senga Bay, Salima.  During the circuit, nobody divined that the one-time calendar event, which  used to attract a diversity of locals and tourists, would celebrate its 10th

 birthday in a near dead state. It was equally unforeseen that the observance  would happen in City of Dust sanitised as ‘City of Stars’.  Holding the Lake of Stars Festival in Lilongwe does not make the capital a City of Stars’. I don’t know the catchphrase city authorities use for

 marketing Lilongwe, but it is no city of stars. When you are in the city,  the only stars you see are those in the galaxy in the sky—a common feature

 across the globe—not the special sights tourists, explorers and other  sightseers get on Lake Malawi from Songwe to Monkey Bay.

 By the way, commemorating the festival in Lilongwe seems to be a spectacular  way of killing the fulfilling fun, reinvigorating experience and tourism

 potential it used to represent.   I cannot imagine a Lake of Stars affair with no lake in sight. I cry for the  diverse merrymakers who used to save a fortune just to make sure they didn’t

 miss the once-a-year feeling swimming, jamming, sleeping, walking barefooted  and going wild on the sands and in the waters.

 Let the festivals return bigger and better.