The meeting was well timed, the performers perfectly plucked out of the pack and the venue just right for their pensive minds craving thoughtful works of art.
On Friday, the country’s flagship poet Nyamalikiti Nthiwatiwa stood up to the occasion to match Body, Mind and Soul on what was supposedly their home ground.
The venue? Sunbird Mzuzu. The event? A red-carpet get-together hosted by Airtel Malawi to mark the ending of 2012, a year the telecommunication firm’s sales director Elias Dziko termed a “success story”.
Add successful performers to the wining and dining in honour of the said success story, you have the reason the lucky Airtel customers in the Northern Region did not go to sleep whining on Friday night.
In the region’s most promising band, Body, Mind and Soul – who won the five-nation Music Crossroads Trophy four years ago – the patrons had a feast of well-calculated Afro-jazz tunes that carefully transport hearers on the thin line between the conscious beats of Afro-jazz maestro Wambali and the region’s traditional beats, especially vimbuza from Rumphi and Mzimba.
During their time on song, Davie Luhanga and company gave the patrons a taste of their potent portion when they played Ndakukonda, an expression of commitment to an unnamed sweetheart, and Tizenge, an adaptation of a Ngonde song from Karonga which calls on children spread far and wide to return home – for east or west, home is best.
If the noiseless jazzy tunes that smoothly trickled into listeners’ ears helped the food and drinks get down the throats with ease, then Nthiwatiwa has himself for forcing the party-makers to explode into uncurbed laughs as they grappled to grab every word of his immensely hilarious and well-knitted poems, There is Hope for Distant Love, Muzitamanda Mulungu and Dziko Lili Mmanja mwa Agalu.
But the hit of them all was Dziko Lili Mmanja mwa Agalu, a satirical look at how Malawi has gone to the dogs as its people, from leaders to the subjects, loot, ransack public coffers, fornicate and refuse to reason better than the most ridiculed domesticated animal in the land.
