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Zambia

We Intend To Cause Havoc, in full

WITCH

WITCH, an acronym for We Intend To Cause Havoc, formed on Zambia's Copperbelt around 1972, led by singer Emmanuel "Jagari" Chanda. It became the country's most popular band of the decade and toured behind five albums. The sound started as straight Rolling Stones-style garage rock and turned darker and more psychedelic after the band toured with the Ghanaian Afro-rock band Osibisa. Zambia's collapsing economy and a wave of piracy finished off the Zamrock scene by the end of the 1970s. Chanda left the band in 1980 to become a schoolteacher, later worked for a time as a gemstone miner, and was largely forgotten outside Zambia until a 2019 documentary crew found him still living nearby. The film led to a real second act: European and American tours and, in 2023, Zango, WITCH's first new album in roughly forty years. Chanda's voice was still very much intact.

Hendrix, via the Copperbelt

Amanaz

Amanaz formed in Kitwe in 1973 around bandleader and singer Keith Kabwe. They recorded their only album, Africa, that year at Malachite Film Studios in Chingola and had split by 1976. One later critic described what they left as "deep, bluesy grooves with a strong psychedelic undercurrent and thick layers of fuzz guitar," and the record owes as much to Jimi Hendrix as to Zambian rhythm and vocal phrasing. It found almost no audience at the time and was a footnote even within Zambia's own short-lived Zamrock scene. Decades later the reissue label Now-Again tracked down surviving band members, including fellow Zamrock veteran Rikki Ililonga, who helped annotate a proper 2015 reissue. Africa finally got the international hearing it missed the first time around.

Zamrock's rarest record

The Peace

The Peace grew out of Chamboli Mine Township in Kitwe, put together from members of two earlier bands, The Boyfriends and WITCH itself. They recorded their only album, Black Power, on the same Malachite Film Studios session circuit that produced Amanaz's Africa. While their Zamrock peers pushed toward heavier psychedelia, The Peace stuck close to an almost anachronistic late-'60s flower-power sound, with love and freedom themes run through funk and Jefferson Airplane-style psych-pop. The album came out in 1975 on the small Zambia Music Parlour label in a pressing so limited that surviving original copies, often missing their covers entirely, are now among the scarcest records in the whole Zamrock catalog. A planned second album was recorded but never released, and the band broke up not long after. For most listeners, Now-Again's 2016 reissue of Black Power is the only way they have ever heard them.

The Collection