Tumaini Festival which is held at Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Dowa and is for free has started gearing up for this year’s festival by holding an artist’s forum which took place last weekend.
The festival’s founder and director Trésor Nzengu Mpauni better known as Menes la plume said the event this year is planned for November 4 and 5.
Menes said apart from sharing ideas on how to uplift their talents, the artists forum was also part of reviewing last year’s festival and also announce some of the new plans.
“This was a very unique and important platform and its objectives among others, were to give artists a platform to share ideas and suggest solutions for the future,” said Menes, who is also a renowned poet and musician.
The artist, who last year was featured on Aljazeera where he spoke about his life as a refugee and how he found himself at Dzaleka, said the forum was also aimed at creating collaboration between people doing different art forms at Dzaleka.
The refugee camp has shown its potential in the arts as just recently a dancing group known as Salama Africa Dance Crew went all the way to the grand finale of the Ka Jive Dance competition season two spearheaded by Times Group through Times Television.
“We want to grow the Tumaini Festival so that it is known all over, so this is why we organised this forum. It was also part of uniting people from different nationalities and religions through arts and at the same time identifying all artists from Dzaleka and the surrounding villages for future projects,” he said.
Menes also revealed that they have plans this year to build the Youth and Arts Centre Tumaini Festival.
“We are leaving no stone unturned, all we want is to grow the arts in the camp, we want to build the arts from the grassroots because there is talent here but it has not been given the platform,” said Menes.
He said that the artists acknowledged during the forum that they are the mirrors of society and that they have a responsibility to educate apart from entertaining.
“As artists we believe that art can bring change and develop the camp and make it a better place to live because any refugee camp can be a place of desperation but art can help bring happiness,” he said.
Menes also said that there were lots of artists in the camp who were reeling to fly with their talents but are let down because they have no platform to showcase their talents and that many do not have resources.
“Many young people start some amazing ideas and stop after a short period of time and this is because artists are discouraged because of lack of events to showcase and lack of equipment and a market for their work and there is no any support,” he said.
Menes said despite standing up on their own through different initiatives, arts was neglected in the camp adding that there are no structures.
“We need structures for performances or even training but many organisations who have come up do not have an interest in the arts and again we hope arts organisations such as Musicians Union of Malawi and others will come up so that we work together,” he said.
Menes also said that artists in the camp are in need of competitions and that they should have opportunities to travel out of the camp to show their talents as well as see what others do.
The artist however, bemoaned the absence of female artists during the forum saying that it was dominated by male artists
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