Forde Traditional and World Music Festival artistic and managing director, Hilde Bjorkum, said on Sunday that Malawi has talented young artists who just need the right platform to shine.
Bjorkum commended organisations such as Music Crossroads for taking their time to unearth talent from the grassroots and nurture it.
She said this was one of the reasons the festival organisers decided to initiate the young talent project.
“The young artists from Malawi are amazing; we also appreciated impressive talent from Kenya and Norway. We started this project to help nurture talent and also get the young talent to appreciate traditional music,” said Bjorkum.
On Sunday, the festival presented certificates to young musicians from Norway, Kenya and Malawi.
“The young talent produced outstanding performances during a gala and, as a festival, we are thankful to Ministry of Foreign Affairs for supporting the project. They [young people] started from scratch— not knowing each other— and then connected,” she said.
Bjorkum said performing on the main stage for the young talent was key as they have been motivated.
“They saw the best and now they can also believe that they can be stars if they work hard.
Again they need to be proud of their culture,” she said.
Asked what criteria they used in selecting Malawi and Kenya, the festival’s boss said they selected countries which have music programmes, and that Malawi and Kenya stood out.
“Last year, we had Iran and Armenia and this year we thought of Africa and, Kenya and Malawi fitted the bill. We hope they will continue their music development programmes,” said Bjorkum.
The Talent 2016 from Malawi is made up of Patrick Chimbewa, Thokozani Mdoko and Asante Maulidi while Kenya has Faith Wangui, Saumu Mwatela and Omar Mwatela.
In a related development the Kenya, Malawi and Norway young artists had a church performance on Sunday.
And their performance served as an example of how culture and religion can work together, apart from strengthening the partnership between the festival organisers and churches.
Bjorkum, who is a dancer and fiddler, said she came up with the idea of a festival focusing on tradition and world music after noticing that not many festivals were doing that.
“We actually started on a low note as many people wanted us to do the usual, which focuses on attracting well-known artists. However, we have remained truthful to our focus of promoting traditional and world music and people have started embracing it and over the years we have received overwhelming proposals from artists from across the world,” she said.
Bjorkum said they have built a reputation as a festival that is unique and is there to promote culture.
“We are amongst the Top 10 European festivals, as named by The Guardian, and we are a rich festival,” she said.
This year’s festival focuses on the refugee situation and, according to Bjorkum, there are a lot of refugees who have found themselves in poor situations because of the state of their nations.
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