WITCH: We Intend to Cause Havoc

Back in 2012, Malik Bendjelloul’s doc­u­men­tary Search­ing for Sug­ar Man explored under­sung record­ing artist Rodriguez, a Detroit-born singer-song­writer. More specif­i­cal­ly, the film looked at the unusu­al degree of suc­cess and influ­ence his music exert­ed in apartheid-era South Africa. Its fram­ing device sees two South African Rodriguez fans in the late 1990s jour­ney to find out what hap­pened to this rel­a­tive­ly obscure musi­cian in light of his stu­dio album out­put end­ing in the 1970s.

The set-up of Gio Arlotta’s music doc­u­men­tary, WITCH, is cer­tain­ly not iden­ti­cal to that of Bendjelloul’s film, but the rhythms of the edit­ing bear a strong resem­blance and it does also con­cern a small group’s pil­grim­age to track down a musi­cal titan from the 1970s that they want to bring to more people’s atten­tion. That the jour­ney of the film effec­tive­ly starts in 2014, only two years after Sug­ar Man’s suc­cess, makes an inten­tion­al influ­ence seem plausible.

Rather than fans ven­tur­ing from an African coun­try to find and learn more about their idol, WITCH sees fans com­ing to Africa from afar instead. The coun­try in ques­tion is Zam­bia and the eager researchers include Ital­ian direc­tor Arlot­ta him­self, who nar­rates, and Dutch baroque pop artist Jac­co Gard­ner. They’re on a mis­sion to meet and learn from Jagari, the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of the orig­i­nal line­up of WITCH (acronym: We Intend to Cause Hav­oc), the most pop­u­lar band of a musi­cal move­ment labelled ​‘Zam­rock’: Zam­bian music that com­bined a mix of rock, soul, funk, psy­che­delia, afro-beat and, even­tu­al­ly, dis­co. Jagari, real name Emmanuel Chan­da, adopt­ed that name because his exu­ber­ant on-stage per­for­mances were com­pared to those of Mick Jagger.

After an arrest, prison sen­tence and reli­gious con­ver­sion, Jagari went on to live a qui­et life of coun­try­side gem­stone min­ing. But the mak­ing of the doc­u­men­tary and reunion with Zam­rock peers leads to a ref­or­ma­tion of WITCH to com­mence inter­na­tion­al tour­ing, in light of their back cat­a­logue reach­ing much of the west­ern world for the very first time, thanks to the long-delayed dis­tri­b­u­tion of those albums. In a strange turn of fate, Arlot­ta him­self ends up becom­ing the man­ag­er of the new ver­sion of WITCH, who embark on their first ever Euro­pean tour.

Although the charm­ing Jagari is the pri­ma­ry focus, he is not the documentary’s only par­tic­i­pant from the peri­od. Oth­ers include Patrick Mwon­dela, who was a mem­ber of WITCH in its ear­ly 1980s dis­co phase, and Vic­tor Kaso­ma, gui­tarist of the band The Oscil­la­tions. They are among the few sur­vivors of the Zam­rock move­ment, as many of their peers were, accord­ing to Jagari, sus­pect­ed vic­tims of the AIDS epi­dem­ic dur­ing the 1980s.

This is one way in which the doc­u­men­tary is solemn along­side being cel­e­bra­to­ry. Anoth­er is reflect­ed in how the state-owned tele­vi­sion company’s poor preser­va­tion of footage of the Zam­rock movement’s hey­day means that there is vir­tu­al­ly no archive mate­r­i­al of WITCH per­form­ing. News­pa­per clip­pings are the only pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments. Jagari’s mag­net­ic present-day pres­ence is thank­ful­ly able to make up for this lack of footage. You nev­er doubt at all that this man was a capital‑S star.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them. But to keep going, and grow­ing, we need your sup­port. Become a mem­ber today.