ASK  ME  ABOUT  PSYCH  ROCK  

IN  ZAMBIA

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“We looked like demons, hey?” Kabwe says, reliving the decades-old memory. He is now a Pentecostal pastor in a remote border town, and has made the 16-hour minibus journey to the capital, Lusaka, to meet me. “The things we were doing, that kind of life,” he says, his voice equal parts wonder and self-reproach. “The picture changes.” A leonine 65-year-old with a remarkably unlined face,

short, turbulent history. Kabwe is an icon of sorts, one of the few survivors from the incendiary

by Western stars like the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, young

turned up the volume on their amps. “We were so crazy,” he

says quietly. Though born in a rural village, Kabwe came to Lusaka when he was 10, a member of

he participated in the “Cha-cha-cha” campaign against the British (so named because, for once,

He helped set up roadblocks and guard a safehouse used by liberation leader Kenneth Kaunda, who became president when independence came. At night, Kabwe patrolled the

pickaxe handle studded with six-inch nails. The colonial authorities arrested him, and he spent six months in prison. “They whipped us,” he remembers. “But we were

Though it is now one of the

which was driven by high copper

heartland, the Copperbelt, grew as workers streamed in looking for better lives. This modernized region was the cradle of

exchange today comes from mining.

looked to the days when

Telephones and airplanes shortened distances between north and south, facilitating the spread of both Marxist philosophy and the music of

like Kabwe, modernity sounded

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the mining industry to support his music. He played in a variety of bands until, in 1973, he formed Amanaz, an acronym for “Ask Me

Amanaz played Beatles and Black Sabbath covers and began writing originals that

and psychedelic guitars with indigenous rhythms. Errol Hickey,

Radio Phoenix station, says the

could do it in the African way.”Africa,

songs about love, beer–drinking, as well as pan-African anthems. An elegiac tune called “Kale,” sung in Nyanja, one of 72 different languages spoken in

from slavery to independence.

packed clubs and opened a stadium show for British Afro-rock stars Osibisa.

Amanaz brought a bit of Haight-Ashbury to conservative Lusaka. Each band member had his own

bells, and big, gaudy belts.

the girlfriends of important businessmen. And there was dope. “We smoked,” Kabwe says with a laugh. “We smoked a lot! There was hard stuff here.

things.” A few minutes later, the

rejoicing about now.”

1970s, the price of copper had plummeted and the mines slashed their workforces. Then, too, there was war on virtually every

guerrillas, suffered under curfews and blackouts, its power stations

commandos. Meanwhile, disco was ascendant and musical

had never been easy to be a full-time rock musician. Now it was almost impossible.

Just after the 1982 rainy season, he went digging for emeralds

gems to buy new instruments. The guards at the site, which was owned by the state, were known

afford to bribe them. As Kabwe dug, a particularly fearsome guard called “the Scorpion” descended on him. Luckily, the Scorpion was a fan. “He had a guitar,” Kabwe

and the band soon fell apart. By this time, he was having second thoughts about his life. He recorded a gospel album in 1979 and was going to church regularly, but now he enrolled in Bible college. Kabwe married

became a small businessman, selling parts for and repairing copiers, typewriters, and

a country in which 64 percent of the population still lives in poverty. Kabwe left the music business

out of 100,” says Billie Nyati, a Copperbelt producer and band manager who arranged the songs on Africa. Kabwe lost at least one band member to the pandemic, and sees providence in his own survival.

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purpose.” We leave the coffee shop and go for a walk. Kabwe tells me about his congregation, which has grown from seven to 200 souls in three years. He says he has found his calling.

Kabwe never expected to join his heroes in the rock pantheon, but

now, at least in a small way. Thanks to Now-Again, a Los Angeles-based label that reissues little-known funk, soul, and psychedelia recordings, Africa

the West. Music bloggers have picked up on the album, and no wonder, says label owner Eothen Alapatt, who has put out

number of bands. 75

Alapatt was struck, he says,

Velvet Underground-esque laments and charging hard rock

that je ne se quois that elevates it

of my top ten personal favorite records, regardless of genre.” On the sidewalk outside a public library in Lusaka, furtive men buy and sell black-market gems. They are hustling like Kabwe has hustled his entire life. And maybe they will succeed. Kabwe has come to believe that anything is possible. After he cut his hair and started going to church, he tells me, an old acquaintance stopped him, shocked at the transformation. Kabwe laughs

change in life.”

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