Zambia’s Psychedelic Zamrock Is Having a Second Life

17.08.2024 - 09:26 / cntraveler.com / Jimi Hendrix

This is part of Global Sounds, a collection of stories spotlighting the music trends forging connections in 2024.

It’s 9:45 p.m. on a Sunday evening, and the packed auditorium of Greenwich Village’s Le Poisson Rouge is filled with the sound of Zamrock. On vocals is 72-year-old Emmanuel Chanda, who goes by the stage name Jagari Chanda, the charismatic, last surviving original member of Witch, once among the most popular bands in Zambia. He’s wearing a matching waistcoat and pants made of chitenge (an African wax print fabric), a yellow T-shirt, a floppy hat, and bracelets featuring the colors of the Zambian flag: red, green, orange, and black. His look is just as striking as his sound.

That sound is Zamrock, or Zambian rock, a genre born in the 1970s and inspired by American rock performers such as James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin, and pioneered by bands such as Musi-o-Tunya, Amanaz, 5 Revolutions, and, of course, Witch (the name stands for We Intend to Cause Havoc). It’s a combination of psychedelic rock and traditional Zambian music like kalindula, and performed in a range of Zambian local languages, often with two lead guitars, drums, a bass guitar, and percussion, crescendoing into an up-tempo rhythm.

Early hits like “Introduction” (1972) and “In the Past” (1974)—both performed by Chanda the night that I see him—quickly shot Witch to fame. But after the 1980s the band hit pause: The AIDS epidemic claimed the lives of key members, while a crippling economy led many musicians in Zambia to seek alternative employment, including Chanda, who became a teacher and a miner. Plus, the music tastes of the Zambian people evolved after the fall of President Kaunda in 1991, who had a policy that dictated that 95% of music played on Zambian radio stations be made in Zambia.

But a decade or so ago, a renewed interest in the band emerged: There was a 2011 vinyl reissue through Now and Again Records; a 2013 documentary by Kabinda Lemba called Rikki and Jagari: The Zamrock Survivors and another in 2021 by Gio Carlotta; and in 2023, Witch finally released a new album titled Zango, featuring a lead single by the same name. Fast-forward to 2024, and if the roar of the crowd at Poisson Rouge is anything to go by, Zamrock is experiencing a revival. “In Zambia they think [music is] a career for failures,” Chanda shouts from the stage. “But in America it’s the other way around.”

As a child who grew up listening to my father’s Zamrock records—here in the United States and in Germany and Ethiopia—I was curious to find out whether, over 30 years later, Zamrock was also seeing a similar revival in Zambia. Armed with some music industry contacts, I flew to Lusaka, its capital.

My first stop is Radio Cafe studios in