The Banjo Boys North American Premiere
Thursday, December 4, 6:00pm, with a post-screening Q&A
Cowin Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, as part of the African Diaspora International Film Festival
Mukwae Wabei Siyolwe (PS MA ’04) is the Executive Producer of The Banjo Boys, a feature-length documentary set to make its North American premiere at the African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) on Thursday, December 4, at 6:00 p.m. The screening will take place at the Cowin Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, and will be followed by a Q&A with members of the creative team.
The Banjo Boys follows Madalitso Band—Yobu Maligwa and Yosefe Kalekeni—two street musicians from Lilongwe, Malawi, whose hand-built instruments, polyrhythms, and storytelling have carried them from performing in local markets to appearing on major international festival stages. The film traces their evolving creative partnership with British musician Neil Nayar and his brother, director Johan Nayar, while engaging broader questions of authorship, labor, and transnational collaboration in contemporary African performance cultures.
The film raises central Performance Studies disciplinary questions in a specifically Malawian context:
- How do performers negotiate precarity, visibility, and joy in the everyday spaces of the Lilongwe streets and markets?
- What happens when “local” performance practices are mediated through documentary film, “world music” circuits, and European festival stages?
- Where do power, risk, and care sit in a collaboration between Malawian street musicians and a British musician/filmmaker team?
- When is documentation a form of witnessing and accompaniment rather than extraction?
- Why do these performances matter for how we understand Black and African creativity, authorship, and survival in the 21st century?
The documentary also connects to Siyolwe’s broader hybrid practice as a performance maker, pedagogue, and cultural producer. Her work integrates tools such as rasaboxes and ethnographic performance methods into workshops and community-based labs with youth and artists across Malawi, Mexico, Europe, and the United States. The Banjo Boys is envisioned not only as a stand-alone film but as the foundation for a touring initiative, "The Madalitso Experience", which will combine screenings, live concerts, and lecture-performance formats to spark dialogue on performance, mobility, and media literacy across the Global South and diaspora.
About Siyolwe:
Mukwae Wabei Siyolwe is a cultural curator and media learning strategist working at the intersections of documentary, music, and geo-political ritual interventions across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. She is the Executive Producer of an award-winning documentary, The Banjo Boys (Moviehouse, 2025), and a co-host of Planet Afropop, a syndicated podcast produced by the Peabody Award–winning Afropop Worldwide and distributed by PRX on 113 channels and all major streaming platforms.
Trained as an actor, singer, and dancer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she also holds an MA in Producing Film and Video (American University) and an MFA in Film and Digital Technology (Chatham University). Her performance and screen credits span the Oscar™-nominated Cry Freedom (dir. Richard Attenborough, Universal) and work in theatre, opera, and musical theatre in the UK and the U.S.
Her hybrid projects and teaching practice foreground Black/African creative continuity, tracing Nilotic cultural citizenry and tracking how orature adapts and endures across Black global identities.
She has taught as an assistant professor and lecturer at institutions including Towson University, the University of Namibia, the Norwegian Theatre Academy, and Østfold University College, where her teaching and media practice draw on Orature, rasaboxes, and auto-ethnographic performance methods, restoring memory, reclaiming heritage, and reimagining Black Global Futures through storytelling, performance, visual, and audio documentary.
She is currently touring two productions in Spain and Latin America: Turf – Infinite Tierradentro Performance, created in collaboration with Gail Langstroth and combining eurhythmics, acting, and music with Trioscuri Ensemble in Madrid; and Wade in the Water, a hybrid oratorio and ritual drama created with Haitian American composer Daniel Bernard Roumain, which premiered at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh and has toured the U.S., Mexico, and Africa since 2013. She is also at work on Cherry Ripe: Chronicles of a Rebellious Princess, a performance memoir.