Jamal Khadar is an Amsterdam-based journalist and host of the always excellent Reimagining Country show on NTS Radio. He helped produce our Alick Nkhata album, connecting us with Nkhata’s family and undertaking a prodigious amount of research for the liner notes. I caught up with him about African country music lineages, and the first Mississippi release to lead to a FOIA request…

Huge thanks to Gordon Ashworth for first sharing Nkhata’s music and putting so much time and energy into sourcing material, to Nkhata’s daugther Daisy Nkhata-Ng’ambi and nephew Africa Munyama their collaboration and trsut, Ellen Banda-Aaku for her poetic lyric translations, Michael Kieffer, Rob Allingham, Simeon Allen, and Mark van Yetter for their help with source materials, Jordan McLeod at Osiris Studio for making it all sound so good, Ella Gold for her album artwork, Eli Schmitt for transcribing all these interviews, and of course the fam Sam, Maria, and Adam. This album is dedicated to Nkhata’s son, David Nkhata, who first began research and documentation of his father’s work, but passed before this album could come to be. We hope he’d be proud.

Cyrus Moussavi: What drew you to African country? Or how would you even describe what it is that you're researching and listening to?

Jamal Khadar: I was steeped in country by my parents from a young age, but I think like most people I didn't pay too much attention to it. There's a lot of country, Americana themed stuff in their music collection. I then rediscovered the music as an adult, as people do with their parents' music collections, and just really grew attached to it. It’s beautiful music. There is plenty of stuff wrong with country, but it’s a great way to think about family and lineage and the passing of time.

My dad is from Sierra Leone, my mom is Jamaican, and I was born in the UK. I was interested in the country connection there, because it seems like such a juxtaposition. On the face of it, it seems against everything we know about country.  I traced it back, a family project, and it became a  way for me to talk to my family about our history. It was how I had the first real conversation with my grandma, and what it was like for her to move to England from Jamaica, and why country was important to her then. It was a great way to think about what was happening for both my grandparents on different sides. Music allows you to see history through people with more nuance than a lot of textbooks. 

Country became a way of looking at early 20th century globalization and the way that music traveled around the world and the way cultures collided. Even though it feels like a long time ago, people from all over were traveling and crossing continents and music was going with them. They were starting bands and projects with people from different parts of the world or from different cultures. That's what interests me in all of this. It's the way that country and ideas of America and Americana traveled the world and were kind of twisted and appropriated and found new lives

CM: It's so cool that it brings together the two sides of your family, who were on different continents but were both listening to this music.

JK: Yeah, exactly. Similar artists as well. People like Jim Reeves had such a significant influence on both of my grandparents. It's interesting to see how the same artists, even the same songs, sometimes, have different meanings across cultures. My Jamaican grandma, when she moved to the UK, had a horrible time. I remember she said, “My only friends were the swans in the park.” But this music, in her case, was about transcendence and moving beyond. There was a religious aspect, too. While on the other side of the family, I think it was the storytelling aspect they were interested in. 

CM: I imagine Jim Reeves would be shocked to hear all this. 

JK: That's something my uncle on the Jamaican side was always conflicted about, like this horribly racist man, Jim Reeves, who at the same time was a saint. There's just lots of sides to it, and it's messy and interesting.

CM: That's what I love about your work. You manage to take this music that is easy to gloss over as very simple and plain, and show us how messy and interesting it actually is.

JK: Yeah, people see it as something plain and pure. When we think of cultures coming together and mixing, we assume it's gonna be complex and explosive and all these things, but no, it's like creole that creolized language. Two people coming together and finding the simplest meeting point. It's complex but also really simple-sounding music that has all these layers to it.

CM: That's a really good description of Alick Nkhata's music. At first it’s a nice pop song. And then you're like, Whoa, this is incredibly tightly constructed. And there are influences coming from multiple continents and time periods at once. How did you first hear Nkhata? And what drew you to him specifically?

JK: Well, I knew Africa Munyama, his nephew. I always had the sense that Africa's family was involved in significant ways in [Zambia’s] history. When I started the radio show, Africa reached out and was like, "Oh, you should check out my uncle's music.” We go back 10 plus years, but had never talked about Nkhata at all. 

[Nkhata’s music] had yodelling and very strong early country and western hillbilly guitar influences. But he’s also in a suit, and it was hard to tell what was going on. Digging into the history, I realized the guy lived such a life. He was coming up everywhere I looked - he worked with Hugh Tracy, he was there during World War II when there was this exchange of influences and sounds, he was there at the beginning of African radio, full stop, on the continent. He was an independence figure who was there in Zimbabwe during the struggles.. There is also this tension with him being involved with the British colonial influence while also being an activist figure, which complicates the easier and more common story we have around that time. 

CM: When I heard you on the radio, I was like, this is my guy. At first, I just heard you play an Alick song. But then I heard you talking about the history, and then interviewing his family. You kept going! I was like, oh, this guy is deep. You ended up doing a huge amount of research for the liner notes of the record. Can you tell me about your process?

JK: I was spending a lot of time in the archives and occasionally sending you photos. What I tried to do was firstly talk to experts who had studied his work. We have to shout out Ellen Banda, who is a family member [of Nkhata’s] and who has a documentary on Nkhata. She was already in the process of doing so much research for years. Speaking to people like Dr. Robert Einstein who’d done loads of research into Alick Nkhata’s radio career working at various African studies centers in Germany and Paris. I then tried to go one layer deeper and be like, who actually met him and was in the room with him. It started incredibly broad, but I felt like there was an end in sight by the time you made me turn in the liner notes. But I still was like, we need to do a FOIA request. Because there’s a possibility that he was involved with the American government in some way. Given his influence in Central African Independence politics, and given that he went to the US and worked for Voice of America as one of the first African hosts, I hope somebody takes this up as a book project and goes further, 'cause there's endless potential here.

CM: What else surprised you in your research?

JK: At first, it was just the messiness of the power relations. The fact that he was both working very closely within power structures and the British colonial establishment, but also over time becoming involved in the independence politics. I didn't know what to think; it was really hard to tell what his beliefs were and how much those changed over time. But it was a good reminder that there are different forms of activism in different contexts. We're used to very visible signs and a very clear story of somebody who's a “musician activist.” But it's more complicated, because, like a lot of people who end up in independence movements, they take advantage of opportunities within the power structure. And for the first people through the wall, there are different ways of protesting. 

More recently, the main surprise is the contemporary mining story. The fact that all of this started one hundred years ago in Zambia with the British South African Trading Company discovering vast copper mines and bringing people to the region, turning it into a melting pot, that's how the music started. That led to Zamrock later. And Zamrock's spectacular collapse midway through the 80s was also the collapse of the copper industry. 

But there is a modern story I found in the later stages of doing the liner notes, where China and the US are now starting the cycle over again. You can’t make this stuff up. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos using AI to map the terrain and discover these incredibly vast, rich copper deposits, as well as  cobalt, and other minerals which we need for smartphones and AI. It's just the same cycle, really. And the fact that that's happening at this Trump, new imperialist moment is very crazy to me. It seems a really poignant moment for Alick’s record to come out.

CM: I’ve been thinking of Alick as a political person, and how we can’t quite pin him down. And art and its connection to politics in general. Could you talk a bit about the role Nkhata’s music had in Zambian independence? 

JK: I think his story really tells us what resistance looks like pre-independence. It starts after WWII, when people are coming back with new influences and attitudes. I couldn’t always tell you where he stood, but through his work, I was left with the impression that he had a fairly consistent view of the importance of Zambian culture and traditions, and how modernity should work for Zambia. He has that full journey from the political awakening to the subtle resistance, through to independence politics, and through to becoming a member of the establishment himself. 

That's the beauty of the music, the tension and toeing the line. He couldn't be explicitly political at all times, but there's a lot of social commentary in the lyrics. And the product of all of his radio work and all of his music work was building a national identity. We also have to remember, he was really the first African voice on the radio for many Central Africans and the first kind of pop star for many Central Africans. 

Looking back at his story and his music, it's almost a eulogy for a certain type of American cultural power and influence. Particularly right now, when America seems to be withdrawing from the rest of the world. It’s a look at how American influence traveled through globalization. How that influence is up for grabs and is twisted and used to explore local identity.

CM: What is the connection to Zamrock? Can you say that Alick was a precursor, or is it just a coincidence?

JK:  I think it's great that Zamrock is so well known for its incredible story and music, but that intense focus has a way of flattening the diversity of Zambian music and its history. So maybe we can't necessarily say that Alick Nkhata led to Zamrock, but that rich history of mixing influences and creating new sounds in the copper belt started with Alick in lots of ways. All of that stuff is what people appreciate about Zamrock - that it was mixing sounds and that it was political in its own way. There's a long history of that approach in the region, and it starts with Alick.

Jamal Khadar is a journalist and the host of the always excellent Reimagining Country on NTS radio. His deeply researched liner notes accompany MRI-209 Alick Nkhata - Radio Lusaka, which is up for pre-order now. The record is pressed on high quality black vinyl, mastered at Osiris Studios, and the album also includes lyric translations by noted Zambian author Ellen Banda-Aaku.