From ‘The Warm Heart of Africa’ emerges the story of Dr. Jack Allison
Memoir recounts unlikely tale of music and fame in Malawi
Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
May 5, 2021
In his memoir — “The Warm Heart of Africa: An Outrageous Adventure of Love, Music and Mishaps in Malawi” —Dr. Jack Allison recounts an unlikely tale of a Peace Corps Volunteer who became a famous singer-songwriter. Photo courtesy of Gold Leaf Literary
Dr. Jack Allison was a young man at a crossroads in his life when he first stepped foot on the soil of Malawi in 1967. Having completed his studies at Warren Wilson College — a two-year institution at the time — and UNC Chapel Hill, he was considering a career in ministry or medicine and volunteered for the Peace Corps while he “sorted it all out.”
He never imagined he would write and record a No. 1 song promoting the use of protein in the diets of the African nation’s children.
Allison, who retired as the Chief of Staff of the Charles George VA Medical Center in 2007 and received the Distinguished Medical Alumnus Award from his Chapel Hill alma mater in 2012, would go on to a lengthy career in emergency medicine, but his 2020 memoir — “The Warm Heart of Africa: An Outrageous Adventure of Love, Music and Mishaps in Malawi” — recounts the unlikely tale of his rise to fame in the region.
The landlocked country, which borders the third-largest lake on the continent, was the poorest in the world when Allison arrived in the rural Nsiyaludzu Village as a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV). He was assigned to a public health initiative that focused on nutrition for children under the age of 5.
“We weighed babies, taught mothers about boiling drinking water and what to feed their kids,” he said. “We did home visits with mothers whose babies had become malnourished and followed up with cooking demonstrations.”
One of the goals was to encourage the use of peanut flour in the diets of children in the village.
“We were asking the mothers to serve them that in their porridge three times a day, instead of one,” Allison said. “It was a major change in Malawi to get people to address those kinds of issues.”
Music with a message
A young Jack Allison rides his bike through a village in Malawi, where he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1967-69. Photo courtesy of Gold Leaf Literary
One of the only things Allison took with him to Africa was his love for music.
As a member of the UNC Men's Glee Club, he performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in the summer of 1966. Days later the group embarked on a five-week European tour.
“We actually sang in the church where Johann Sebastian Bach is buried,” Allison said. “It was a phenomenal trip.”
He had performed numerous times with his band, The One-Eyed Jacks, as a means to supplement his meager income in college.
“There was a Peace Corps doctor who set up our under-5 clinics in Malawi, and he’d heard I was in a quartet in training and that I’d sang in college,” Allison said. “He asked if I could write some jingles and songs about the work I was doing, and I balked at that.
“I said, ‘I’m a bit of a singer but I’ve never written one song in my life,’” he continued. “He said, ‘have at it, dude.’”
Writing a song was one challenge, according to Allison, but doing it in a language he was still learning seemed like a much larger one. While he had completed a month-long immersion course in the Chichewa language, he continued to study it carefully in Malawi and would often repeat the words he learned that day as he fell asleep.
As he became more proficient in Chichewa, which he still speaks fluently, Allison found inspiration through a poster project he worked on with a fellow PCV.
“We both noticed that, as Malawian women would carry their babies on their backs throughout the day, the babies’ faces would be covered with flies,” he said. “The volunteer nearby did two posters, both with a great big fly on them. Even though I’m a doctor I have pretty good penmanship, so I printed, in the local language, ‘brush the flies out of your baby’s eyes to prevent eye disease.’”
Allison quietly played with the phrase in his head as he took his first bath in three months during a retreat at a modest resort on Lake Malawi.
“It was an antique claw-foot tub, and I filled it all the way up to the top with hot water,” he said. “I could see the poster in my mind, and the thing about Chichewa is that nearly every word ends in a vowel. As I was sitting there, I came up with a tune to fit the words.”
By the time he got out of the tub, Allison had an entire song arranged in his mind. He ran down to the beach and found a woman with a relatively rare piece of technology in 1967.
“It was a cassette player,” he said. “I asked if I could borrow it with an empty cassette, went down the beach by myself and hummed the tune so I wouldn’t lose it.”
Making hits
Dr. Jack Allison came to Malawi as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 1967 when he wrote “Ufa Wa Mtedza,” a song that would be No. 1 in the country for three years. Photo courtesy of Gold Leaf Literary
With the song in hand, Allison reached out to a band from Malawi known as the Jazz Giants and invited them to record it with him. The new songwriter was sitting in a barber’s chair days later when he heard the song on the Malawi Broadcasting Corp., the country's only radio station at the time. The record was requested again within 15 minutes and “Brush the Flies” was a hit.
However, it was a song Allison wrote immediately after recording his debut record that would top the charts in Malawi for years.
The message of “Ufa Wa Mtedza,” which translates to “peanut flour,” was to encourage mothers to mix pounded peanut flour in maize porridge and serve it to their children three times a day.
“To use today’s parlance, that song went viral,” Allison said. “People would call in all the time and request ‘that peanut song.’ I was approached by Phillips, which was Norelco at that time, and they wanted to test the record market in Malawi.”
The company pressed the song on a 45 RPM vinyl record and shipped 10,000 copies to Malawi, where they sold out within a week. The song was No. 1 in the country from 1967 - 1970.
Allison wrote approximately 17 songs in three years while operating the baby clinic in Malawi, and his success generated an income he didn’t anticipate.
“I kept making money, but I wasn’t allowed to keep it and I knew that,” he said. “I negotiated with the Peace Corps, and we set up a foundation.”
The money raised from the sales of his music was used to support projects in the region. As the records continued to sell, Allison brought in more than the foundation could spend.
“I had enough left that I was able to bring a young Malawian man back to the U.S. with me so he could attend Warren Wilson College,” he said.
A return to The Warm Heart of Africa
Dr. Jack Allison and his wife, Sue Wilson, visit a village in Malawi, where Allison has written hit songs promoting public health awareness since 1967. Photo courtesy of Gold Leaf Literary
To date, Allison has earned and given away more than $165,000 to various charities in Malawi, but his rise to fame wasn’t without controversy.
“One night I was doing a big show, and one of the volunteers found out I was in the area and came to watch,” he said. “There was an international reporter for Newsweek there, and he asked the volunteer about the white man on the stage interacting with all of the local people.
“The volunteer told him: ‘you’re not going to believe this,’” Allison continued. “‘But, Jack Allison has become more popular with the Malawian people than their own president.’”
The quote was published in a story that ran in the weekly magazine in 1969, and quickly attracted the attention of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the president of Malawi from 1966 - 1994.
“He was not amused, and he threw me out of the country,” Allison said. “The next day, he threw the Peace Corps out. There was a short drawdown by the Peace Corps, but the minister of education told the president if he threw out these volunteers they would lose 60% of their teachers. The president reluctantly allowed the Peace Corps to stay.”
Allison would return to the country 25 years later to write and record an album raising awareness about AIDS, at the request of Project HOPE. He was greeted by reporters when he stepped off the plane, and quickly began answering questions in Chichewa.
“That was really when I first started thinking I had to write all of this down,” said Allison, who has recorded more than 100 songs and jingles, including a recent song promoting COVID-19 safety precautions. “I knew the story of my three years in Malawi was such a big part of my life, and the book is about how my time there had such a powerful impact on my personal and professional life.”
Allison’s memoir borrows its title, “The Warm Heart of Africa,” from the nickname given to Malawi due to the kindness of its people. The book is available at Malaprops in Asheville, Barnes & Noble and online at Amazon.com.
All proceeds from Allison’s memoir will be donated to various nonprofit organizations, including Manna FoodBANK, Marion Medical Mission, Together! ACT Now and the Warm Hearts Foundation.