Across festivals, indigenous knowledge exchanges, and cross-border tourism, Southern Africans are integrating themselves long before policymakers catch up. Photo: Lake of Stars
In October 2025, as the Lake of Stars Festival unfolded on the shores of Lake Malawi, South African musicians performed alongside artists from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. Kenyan performers collaborated with Malawian producers.
Audiences from Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and beyond moved to a rhythm that belonged to no single nation, yet to all of them at once.
Scenes like these, seen across festival grounds, studios, and markets, signalled something quietly revolutionary. Cultural integration is becoming SADC’s most visible, yet least reported, pathway for connecting 16 nations into a shared future.
While policymakers debate tariffs and infrastructure, culture is already integrating the region, dissolving borders in ways spreadsheets cannot measure and negotiations cannot legislate.
The idea behind the Lake of Stars Festival began in 1998 from a British traveller who wanted to showcase Malawian talent. The festival launched in 2004 and has since become an internationally recognised event attracting artists and audiences from South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and beyond.
The 2025 edition will feature regional acts such as South Africa-based Malawian musician Onesimus, Zimbabwean artist Raven Duchess, Kenyan musician Muhonja, and Zambian band Remnants, a rolling tapestry of talent moving freely across SADC borders.
More important than the performances were the infrastructure supporting them. The Lake of Stars team had introduced the Homemade Musical Instruments Programme, which encouraged collaboration across borders.
“We’ve opened up spaces for regional and international artists to exchange cultures,” the organisers explained, adding this showed voluntary integration happening outside any official trade agreement.
This matters because it worked. In 2024, Malawian artists performed in Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, earning foreign exchange while introducing audiences to Malawi’s cultural identity. This soft-power gain, new audiences, new markets, new identity capital, is rarely measured but increasingly essential.
While music festivals draw attention, deeper integration was happening through cooperation on indigenous knowledge systems.
In November 2023, Malawi hosted the 6th SADC Regional Policy Workshop on Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) in Salima district in Malawi, under the theme “Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the Agro-processing and Pharmaceutical Value Chains for Industrial Development.”
These workshops, held since 2004, have become platforms for policy exchange and repositories of regional intelligence.
Experts meet to discuss intellectual property protection, commercialisation strategies, heritage preservation, and research collaboration.
This approach stands out because it has a clear commercial focus. A good example comes from Malawi’s Thyolo district, where farmers grow the Bvumbwe Tomato variety, designed for regional conditions.
The variety spread to Mozambique after businesspeople and consumers travelled to Malawi, connected with farmers in Lukya village, and created a cross-border produce exchange welcomed by farming communities on both sides.
This is integration through profitable cooperation, farmers are now producing with each other’s markets in mind.
A wider ecosystem is forming around this work. From 10–12 September 2025, the SADC Secretariat launched the Southern African Network of Think Tanks in partnership with the EU, AU, and UN Economic Commission for Africa.
The network brings together leading research institutions to develop practical solutions to the region’s toughest challenges.
SADC Deputy Executive Secretary for Regional Integration, Ms. Angele Makombo N’tumba, stressed that research must guide regional decisions and described the SADC National Planning Entities Platform as “a deliberate effort to enhance knowledge exchange and build capacity among planning ministries and commissions.”
In August 2024, President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe handed over one hectare of land for the SADC Liberation Square, part of the 103-hectare Liberation City that will host the Museum of African Liberation.
Heads of state from Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Madagascar, and Tanzania attended, an uncommon gathering beyond routine diplomacy.
The Liberation Square archive is a collective record, not a national one, preserving the region’s shared struggle against colonialism. President Mnangagwa invited SADC countries to contribute art, artefacts, and stories documenting their liberation histories.
Linked to this initiative is the Boundless Southern Africa Unit, established in 2009, which coordinates Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) marketing, develops cross-border tourism routes, and reduces barriers to tourism.
Southern Africa now has 18 TFCAs, large ecological and cultural corridors, containing 38 World Heritage Sites, including Victoria Falls and Mana Pools National Park.
These zones have become spaces where national borders fade and communities move with the freedom they had before colonial boundaries were drawn.
The structures supporting cultural exchange have grown steadily. On 15 January 2022, the SADC Protocol on Trade in Services came into force, providing a legal basis for preferential trade in services such as tourism, communications, and transport.
In practice, it has formalised the cross-border movement of cultural workers.
Services now account for more than 50% of GDP in most SADC states, with tourism a priority sector. The SADC Tourism Programme 2020–2030 sets goals such as boosting intraregional travel, improving the region’s reputation, developing tourism in TFCAs, enhancing visitor experience, and promoting partnerships.
This programme has led to initiatives including SADC Tourism Working Groups, the developing SADC Univisa for seamless travel, and customer service training for border officials.
The economic impact is significant. According to the UN World Tourism Organisation, tourism contributed 2.8% (US$19.4 billion) of SADC GDP in 2017, and 8% (US$56 billion) when indirect and induced effects are included.
The sector directly supported about 2.5 million jobs, rising to 6.3 million when multipliers are considered.
Media as weaver of regional identity
SADC has recognised that integration needs a communication backbone. In November 2025, the Secretariat launched the Communication, Awareness, and Visibility Strategy 2025–2030, an institutional promise to tell the region’s story clearly.
Makombo N’tumba noted, “This Strategy invites us to embrace the rich diversity of our region… ensuring women, youth, persons with disabilities, and marginalised communities feel seen, heard, and represented.”
SADC has appointed National Media Coordinators in each member state to implement communication strategies and translate SADC policies for the public. This network functions like the region’s nervous system, where information flows and regional identity takes shape.
Malawi has made this system visible and competitive. In November 2025, the government launched a campaign urging journalists to excel in the 2026 SADC Media Awards.
Minister Shadric Namalomba said the awards “provide a platform to showcase national stories that advance development and regional integration.” Malawi won three regional awards in 2025, placing second in photojournalism, radio, and television.
The message is clear: well-told stories of regional integration are national assets.
The Lake of Stars Festival offers more than performances. The 2025 edition at Fish Eagle Bay Lodge in Nkhotakota included six festival sites, such as a Fine Arts Site for Malawian art and a Community Site celebrating heritage at Lake Malawi National Park. Each became a marketplace of ideas, art, and cultural energy.
Previous editions brought tangible benefits. Recycled stage materials were turned into 100 desks for local schools. This is not charity for show; it is redistribution built into cultural practice, making festival profits benefit host communities and strengthening ties to regional cooperation.
It would be idealistic to say SADC’s cultural integration has no challenges. Funding limitations, weak digital infrastructure, poor IP protection for traditional knowledge, and South Africa’s dominance remain obstacles.
Yet beneath these challenges, something lasting is emerging. The Southern African Network of Think Tanks, launched in September 2025, is now a permanent engine for turning research into practical policy. SADC’s cultural integration does not happen only at official summits.
It happens at festivals, IKS workshops, liberation-memory projects, and through the everyday work of media coordinators shaping narratives that move beyond narrow nationalism.
The real change is this: when a Malawian farmer exchanges seed with a Mozambican merchant, when artists from six countries share a stage under the stars, when a Johannesburg-based think tank collaborates with scholars in Lusaka, Dar es Salaam, and Harare, integration stops being an abstract government promise. It becomes daily life.
Makombo N’tumba captured this shift: “SADC’s achievements are remarkable, but without effective communication, they risk going unnoticed… We can build a powerful regional narrative that inspires pride, unity, and collective progress.”
This is the strategy, not integration by decree, but integration through story, celebration, commerce, and shared memory.
In a region divided by colonial borders and old rivalries, culture has become the most reliable glue, binding citizens to a future their politicians are still negotiating.
Three thousand people dancing on a Malawian beach may achieve more for regional integration than a room full of diplomats. On stages, in markets, in seed exchanges, and in shared memories, borders fade and identity moves like music across water.