‘Making Music in Malawi’ now available at your favourite bookshop, Chambo Market

First comprehensive exploration of the meaning of music in Malawian society, past and present.

Logos Open Culture’s third publication Making Music in Malawi, by John Lwanda, has hit the shelves.

Making Music in Malawi is a groundbreaking contribution to the historical and sociocultural significance of sounds that make and remake Malawi. A culmination of many years of research, Lwanda covers a staggering range of indigenous and hybrid musical genres, from sikiri to hip hop. Lwanda’s analysis stretches between rural and urban Malawi and extends to the diaspora. He reaches into the precolonial past and projects into the future of music in Malawi. Lwanda roots his analysis in his academic training as a historian, but this text also demonstrates his personal commitment to producing and supporting Malawian music.

This book serves as an archive and mixtape of the sounds of Malawi, from the precolonial period to the postcolonial moment.

Dr John Lwanda is Malawian social historian who has dedicated the last decades to collecting and analysing Malawian music. Lwanda’s expertise is extensive:

he shows how indigenous song and dance met and melded with external influences; he examines the role of music as protest, both in resistance to colonialism and in the postcolonial era; he provides social commentary on the intersections of music, class and gender. He tackles the practical problems of marketing and copyright, and also explores the spiritual dimension of music as prayer and therapy.

A word from the publisher Logos Open Culture

Logos Open Culture is proud to publish this seminal work. Our Director Muti Michael Etter-Phoya said,

‘Making Music in Malawi’ is a monumental publication for Logos Open Culture. In a sense, it pushes the vision even further – perhaps far more than our other projects due to its breadth. From the beginning, Logos Open Culture has always sought to fill in the many blanks that bedevil the keen searcher of the Malawi story. 

As Dr Lwanda ably shows in ‘Making Music in Malawi’, music has played a crucial role in the story of Malawi. Music has outlined our many hopes and has mourned our many failures. It has fanned dictatorial ambitions only later to deconstruct them. The patient reader (this book demands it) is in for a ride.

Making Music in Malawi now available

Pay a visit to your favourite bookshop, Chambo Market, hosted at The Culture Lab at Four Seasons in Lilongwe. Making Music in Malawi by John Lwanda (Logos Open Culture, 2021, MWK 20,000).