The Malawi Collection, consisting of 24 audio tapes, documents musical practices in Malawi whose preservation is under threat. The audio and video recordings, made during field research visits to the southern and central regions of Malawi, show partly very old musical traditions such as the alimba ensembles, which play single-tone xylophones in the religious context of ancestor worship. One focus of the recordings led by the Malawian ethnomusicologist and cultural anthropologist Moya Malamusi (*1958) was on documenting individual instruments that are hardly ever played in Malawi, such as the bangwe or pango (zithers), the small lamellophone chitata or the nkangala, a stick vibrated by the mouth. The collection also documents story-telling practices (nthano, ndano etc.).
The recordings were digitised with funding from the Federal Foreign Office and in cooperation with the Center for World Music.