(b Limbe, Malawi, 1947; d 25 July 1987). Malawian composer. He was Malawi's foremost 20th-century guitar-song composer. He composed both for the six-string acoustic guitar and for the five-string band-guitar which he played in the Kachamba Brothers' Band from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Within an original style, Kachamba's music integrates features of central and southern African guitar music of the 1950s.
His early compositions for band drew heavily on contemporaneous South African popular styles such as kwela and early simanje-manje, hauyani (‘Hawaiian’) guitar from Zimbabwe and lumba (rumba) from Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaïre). His international career began in 1972 with visits to Nairobi and Addis Ababa and an invitation to participate in an international conference on jazz research hosted by the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Graz. Some of his most celebrated songs were written during this period, including Panali agogo (‘There was a Grandmother’), I'm a Beggar Man, Wodala Sofiya (‘Lucky Sofia’), Maliro aKachamba (‘The Funeral of Kachamba’), Sunny Boy and Angoni ajiya ngoma (‘The Angoni Gather for the Ngoma Dance’). After 1972 Kachamba published several 45 r.p.m. recordings made by the now defunct NZERU Record Company in Malawi.
G. Kubik: ‘Daniel Kachamba's Solo Guitar Music: Notes on the Sound Films E2136 and E2137, Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, Göttingen’, Jazzforschung, viii (1976), 159–95
G. Kubik: The Kachamba Brothers' Band: a Study of Neo-Traditional Music in Malawi (Lusaka, 1976)
D. Evans: ‘Review: The Kachamba Brothers' Band’, Journal of American Folklore, xc (1977), 235–6
G. Kubik: ‘Recordings and Films by Daniel Kachamba (1947–1987)’, YTM, xx (1988), 251–4
M.A. Malamusi: ‘Rise and Development of a Chileka Guitar Style in the 1950s’, For Gerhard Kubik: Festschrift, ed. A. Schmidhofer and D. Schüller (Frankfurt, 1994), 7–72
Opeka nyimbo: Musician-Composers from Southern Malawi, Museum Collection Berlin MC15 (1989)
Kaseti ya nyimbo za chikumbutso cha malemu Daniel Kachamba [Memorial cassette of songs by Daniel Kachamba], University of Malawi (1992)
African Guitar: Solo Fingerstyle Guitar Music: Composers and Performers of Congo/Zaire, Uganda, Central African Republic, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia, videotape, rec. G. Kubik, Vestapol 13017 (1995) [incl. notes by G. Kubik]
MOYA ALIYA MALAMUSI