WITCH

Zambia's Zamrock revolutionaries who cut the country's first commercial album in 1972 and returned 40 years later to do it again.

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Zambia's Zamrock revolutionaries who cut the country's first commercial album in 1972 and returned 40 years later to do it again.

MOODS · psychedelic · raw · celebratory · resilient · groove-driven

BIOGRAPHY

WITCH (We Intend To Cause Havoc) formed in Kitwe, Zambia, in the early 1970s, led by vocalist Emanuel "Jagari" Chanda alongside guitarist Chris Mbewe, bassist Gedeon Mulenga, and drummer Boidi Sinkala. Fusing Western rock and R&B with traditional Zambian sound, they became the most popular band of the Zamrock movement, and their 1972 debut Introduction was the first commercial album ever produced in Zambia. Economic collapse and government authoritarianism forced the band to play daytime shows to dodge curfews, and by the 1980s WITCH had dissolved. A 2011 reissue campaign by Now Again Records and Gio Arlotta's 2019 documentary We Intend to Cause Havoc sparked a revival: the band reunited in 2012, toured, and released Zango in 2023 via Desert Daze Sound and Partisan Records, followed by SOGOLO in 2025.

WHY THEY'RE COOL

WITCH's story is one of the great rediscoveries in African rock history: a band that pressed 300 copies of Zambia's first commercial album in 1972, vanished under the weight of political and economic collapse, and re-emerged four decades later to close the loop with new music. Zango, their first album since 1984, featured Zambian rapper Sampa the Great on "Avalanche of Love" and earned a 7.7 from Pitchfork, proof that the psychedelic, curfew-dodging sound Jagari Chanda and his bandmates forged in Kitwe still resonates.