What It's Like To...Run An Arts Festival In Malawi

Schuerwegen witnessed first-hand, the dearth of support granted to the visual arts community, so she convinced the landlord to use the hallway of the shop where she rented space alongside other businesses, as a gallery to showcase art. But she admits that it was an inefficient endeavor. “He started swindling the artists, it was a whole thing,” she says.

She moved from Mulanje to Zomba, some 70km (about 44 miles) northeast, because it provided better living conditions for her and her children.

Before Malawi, she had been involved in twists and turns that include running a fairly popular blog on parenting between 2009 and 2012, working extensively in marketing, and teaching dance.

It was in 2020 that a conversation between herself and another lodge owner led to the Zomba City Festival. Part of the mission was to establish Zomba as a tourist destination. The lockdown period had other plans, however, so the real work only started in 2021. There was no substantial sponsorship money to tap into, and there have been minimal cash injections through fundraising, GoFundMe and smaller grants since then. Zomba City Festival, whose fourth iteration concluded this past April, is therefore a communal effort from everyone involved in the organization process.

Schuerwegen speaks to OkayAfrica about the joys, the downsides, and the big and small victories, in segments edited for length and clarity.

Laura Schuerwegen: The festival happens across several venues in town, every year we have different ones, which makes each edition unique. This way, we make the audience move around the city and explore and discover what it has to offer.

What I love most about my work is creating a massive event and seeing it come to fruition. We had five venues and eight stages over three days this year, with a string of workshops running simultaneously. We ran for four days across eight venues in 2023.

We schedule a lot of ‘unseen talent,’ people who maybe never performed or exhibited before. We launched a great many careers in the arts. To put those people on a stage with a big audience and see that what they bring is appreciated is a special kind of magic. People we have directly put on, like Mtameni, first got paid by us to perform. Mazani also performed with us before he got a stage anywhere else. Last year, we used Trappy’s song as our theme song and put him on our stage, and he blew up immediately thereafter. This is not to take away from his own campaign, which was really good. It’s not like we ‘make’ people, we just give people a platform.

The second aspect is teamwork; we work with a large group of young creatives and have maintained a team throughout the four festivals. We've really become a family over the years. The connection is real. One of our mission points at the Zomba Arts Platform, which is the organizing entity of the festival, is to professionalize the creative sector in Malawi. We are doing that through mentoring young creative professionals, as well as partnering with events such as the Sand Music Festival Malawi, Mulanje Peaks and Rhythms Festival, Tumaini Festival, and others.

Organizing events in Malawi is extremely challenging in every dimension. The financial side is probably the hardest part. Luckily we are quite good at budgeting and have managed to always turn around and break even. It would obviously be nicer to work with bigger budgets.

We received seed money from Dignitas International, which left the region of Zomba at the time, but wanted to leave something to the community, and since the founding partner and I had already been active in community arts projects, they trusted our initiative.

We have been funding the festival through a creative mix of fundraising abroad (through events, sales, GoFundMe) as well as minimal sponsorships and partnerships that help us in kind, local fundraising events, and art funds such as Sound Connects Fund last year and COSOMA fund this year.

We've been very successful at what we set out to do. This festival tackled a lot of things that are now shifting. There was very little scene for anything besides mainstream music in Malawi, but since we launched, the industry has become much more inclusive; people are including other artforms as well.

So when I first moved here, all one would hear in bars or during weddings was Afrobeats, and maybe Malawian artists like Patience Namadingo, Gwamba, and Kell Kay. These are the artists who were regularly on event line-ups. Now, you have artists like Crispy Malawi who was largely underground before blowing up.

As a mother myself, it was important that our event was accessible to all ages; children under twelve enter free. We see that since we have successfully launched that as a format, more events are hopping on and including kids in their events.

But on a whole, as a philosophy, I'd say I am striving for art to be more present, for careers in the arts to be viable and valid, and for people to have options and be able to participate in culture.