The Katakwe evolution
His avid followers make a date with Katakwe every Saturday in Weekend Nation. Deeper avid followers of this foot-in-mouth, tongue-in-cheek and witty but highly irresponsible character in Katakwe Kutauni, a novel author Lawrence Kadzitche published in 2010.
In 2011, another book, Katakwe Zaka 10, followed. It was a compilation of stories that were published since Katakwe’s first appearance.
Now the caricature’s devotees can enjoy Katakwe from their screens, as the Tauni Siisunga Kape movie, starring Katakwe hit the streetson Monday. That is Katakwe’s evolution.
The movie centres around its protagonist Katakwe, a Mchinji villager who decides to go to town for greener pasture. Not knowing the intricacies of town life, he finds himself losing money to some town crooks and is left homeless.
After he runs out of options, Katakwe moves in with a prostitute, Chikondi, with whom he tricks people in the capital city, Lilongwe, where the film was shot. Full of ruses as he is, Katakwe adjusts to town life by getting what he wants using tricks. However, in the end, the trickster is tricked.
In all, Kadzitche had a good story and is surely a good storyteller evident from how he writes the Katakwe column. On the other hand, the leading man showed consistency in his Chewa accent which went well with the Lilongwe city setting. Tauni Siisiunga Kape
However, the cast of characters he chose for the movie proves this time he chose wrong people to help him achieve that. He used amateurs.
The author is wary of that: “All the actors in the movie have no previous experience acting in films. In coming up with the cast, I used people I either knew or were recommended to me by friends who knew I was making a film.”
The film stars Samuel Chiona as Katakwe, Bertha Yohane as Chikondi the prostitute, Ted Kambuzi as Sparks, Smart Paulo as Smart who first robbedKatakwe shortly after his arrival in town. Kadzitche himself plays John Gambe, the city’s crime boss.
Apart from using amateurs, the movie had other shortfalls in how it was shot, scene selection and sound control. The presumable use of a single camera and the lack of a boom mike compromised the quality of picture and sound respectively, which Kadzitche must look into as he tries to reach the bar set by such movies as Shemu Joyah’s Seasons of a Life, Taonga Nkhonjera’s B’
But who is Lawrence Kadzitche?
Born on November 20, 1970 in a family of nine, Kadzitche spent much of his early childhood in rural Mzimba, Dedza, Mulanje,
Growing up in a family of eight boys and a girl, he says, helped develop a story-telling nature in him.
“With only one girl in the family, we were expected to do all the household work. We swept, mopped, cooked and even pounding maize in mortars. Since our house was mostly situated far from other houses, mother used to make up for our loneliness by telling stories, the kamdothi stuff,” saysKadzitche.
The love for books heightened after his father Felix, a forester, went to England where he bought so many books, including Arabian Nights, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
It is this interest that aroused him to write.
He looks back: “I remember I would write the stories my parents told me in book form spiced with drawings even at an early age of 10. Drawing was my other love. In those days, I always got comics from Claim Mabuku and Malawi Book Service. Although we lived mostly in the bush, our shelf was never short of books and magazine.”
It is through reading such local magazines as Moni and the Police Magazine that he discovered local writers such as Willie Zingani and Jolly MaxNtaba. He was so hooked Ntaba’s work, so much that when he was in secondary school he used to ask the Avenger’s Fury author to polish his works.
“I idolised Jolly so much that during one of the school holidays in 1989, I paid him a visit at the Polytechnic where he was teaching. It was an event I would never forget, meeting my top writer. He took me to his home where we had lunch and he shared with me writing tips. I would meet him again in 1991 as my communication teacher when I joined the Polytechnic as a student,” says Kadzitche.
The Katakwe character was born in 2000 when he first appeared in Weekend Nation’s Chichewa supplement, Tamvani. Fourteen years down the line,Kadzitche says he is proud of the following the caricature is getting.
“Mostly, the stories deal with everyday family and social issues. I get inspiration for the stories from the things I see, hear or even participate in. It is purely fiction and if they bear any semblance to any real story, this is just coincidental. Of course, when I am writing the stories, I write them in such a way that they should sound real. That is why I use real places although in a fictional way,” said Kadzitche.
