Malawi's musical turn

It was mid-afternoon on the western shores of Lake Malawi , and a 3,000-plus crowd of Africans and Europeans was shuffling across the sand, heads arched upwards at a blue dot floating through the sky. The Malawian minister of tourism had just thrown himself out of a plane. For five minutes the wind swung him this way and that across the bay, over the yellow mounds of bush that pin the beach, until finally he came to land on the sand with a whoosh.

He freed himself from his parachute, stripped down to a fluorescent floral shirt and battled through the crowd towards a wooden stage, where a gang of local carpenters was still banging in buffer planks over huge bass speakers flown in from the UK the night before. "Malawi does not want to be known as the place where Madonna adopts babies," he said. "This is a country with swagger. I hereby issue a ministerial directive ordering everyone to enjoy themselves!"

Five thousand miles from the throes of the British festival season, the seventh Lake of Stars festival had begun. In the crowd were hundreds of Brits who had made the 20-hour journey from the UK – via Heathrow, Nairobi and a four-hour bus journey from the capital, Lilongwe, and parched plateaus. Expectations of mud, motorways and cider dissolved. In their place: lilting palm trees, 50- mile views across Lake Malawi to the shores of Mozambique, and 35C heat.

"He's right," said Will Jameson, the founder of the Lake of Stars festival. "All you hear about Malawi is famine and sadness. No one seems to realise how much fun and happiness there is."

Jameson first visited the country as a worker for the Wildlife Society on his gap year in 1998. He returned to Liverpool John Moores University with an empty carton of the Malawian beer Chibuku Shake Shake and started a club night named in its honour, which was voted the UK's best by Mixmag in 2004. With the experience and contacts he garnered through the club, Jameson threw the first Lake of Stars festival later that year and managed to attract 700 people (120 of whom were from the UK) to the northwestern shores of the lake at Chintheche.

Jameson knew that a festival in Malawi couldn't operate on the British model, so he tore up the rule book. "Most of the staff are volunteers, and barely any of the acts get paid. We've got local musicians playing together with international stars, and budding sound technicians from local villages shadowing everything that happens on stage. It's different. Some festivals airlift into an area and then leave. We don't want that. We bring more than $1m into the area and, eventually, we hope to hand the whole thing over to the Malawians.