In the early morning of July 21, 2024, Mahali Khuluoe, 22, was at home dozing when her phone rang. The person on the other end of the line was her father’s friend — his voice was tight and hesitant.

“Where’s your dad?” he asked. 

“He left yesterday but hasn’t come back,” she replied. 

The friend hung up. 

Mahali didn’t feel right; her father’s friend hadn’t seemed right either — it was as if his tone was full of knowledge he didn’t want to deliver. “It was just suspicious,” she tells me. 

Minutes later, Mahali scrolled through the news on her phone. That’s when she saw what she’d previously only detected in the friend’s voice. Her father had been shot. 

Mahali rushed to the police station. There might have been a mistake, she thought. Maybe he was on his way home. When she got there, the authorities answered in spare speech and blunt officialdom: Her father had been murdered, they said. 

The day before, at 8 p.m. in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, a small country in southern Africa, Kholopo Khuluoe, 42, sat in the driver’s seat of his burgundy ­station wagon. Next to him was Pulane Macheli, 27, a well-known radio DJ. They were waiting for a third person — a friend, or so they thought. But before that person arrived, and before they could flee in the car, gunmen opened fire,
9 mm bullet shells littering the ground around the vehicle. 

“The police told us he died at the scene,” Mahali says. Then, they took her to the government mortuary to identify the cadaver. 

That day, the grief was overwhelming. Her father had been her business partner, friend, and guide — she was always with him. She was his only child. Mahali cried in front of the press cameras that came to report her father’s death. “I’ve lost the purpose of life,” she said.

In Lesotho, people knew Kholopo Khuluoe by his stage name, Lisuoa, which means “Spitefulness.” He was among the brightest and most controversial stars in the famo music scene — a genre of music indigenous to Lesotho, characterized by rap-like chanting, frantic accordion playing, and rhythmic drumming. In recent years, organized crime and violence have plagued it.

Lesotho is a country of slightly more than 2 million people and 11,720 square miles of mountains and plateaus, all inside of South Africa, making it slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. Famo has been performed there since the early 20th century, and its popularity took off in the late 1960s. It’s heard in markets or throbbing from taxi radios and speakers in rickety roadside bars. Each region in Lesotho has its own unique sound, and different groups have formed around various famous artists. There had always been feuds among these groups. As with hip-hop, musicians and their crews would often throw lyrical jabs at rivals — the word “famo” means to flare one’s nostrils, or throw up one’s dress. When it started, though, these feuds were just for sport. 

Since the turn of the 21st century, famo music’s rapid commercialization and growth have transformed it from a cultural cornerstone to a weapon in violent gang conflicts. Once primarily known for their art, musicians now compete to control lucrative, often illicit industries, including illegal gold mining in South Africa. Some prominent famo artists have become gang leaders, using the music as branding exercises to shore up power and inflame rivalries. These rivalries have escalated to such extremes that the government has declared 12 famo groups as illegal terror organizations, and Lesotho’s homicide rates are among the highest in the world. Nine hundred and forty-four people were murdered in 2022, and police sources say gang violence has likely contributed to these rates. While West Africa’s Afropop has exploded in worldwide popularity in recent years, the music that had defined this small southern country for decades is now being defined by violence.

Khuluoe’s songs didn’t shy away from the brutal realities surrounding him. In “Lefu” (“Death”), he sang about what it meant to live knowing death was always near, waiting for you to slip. In another hit, “Khomo ea Lefisa” (“The Cow That Was Branded”), he cast himself as a man whose innocence had been stolen, shaped by hardship into someone he never thought he would become. The song was a metaphor for the times, and how living such a life could harden even the most unassuming of men. “I have always been a good person. I did not choose to be a bad one. The harsh land has shaped my path. My people, I was good. It is not my doing. I have been wronged by others along the way,” he sang. 

For his daughter, Mahali, and others I spoke to, Khuluoe was a peacemaker and a good man: “We used to be a dad-daughter duo,” she says. In the weeks before his death, he spoke out at a rival gang member’s funeral, calling for and later attending a national prayer rally led by the queen and prime minister to commemorate a recent spate of killings. For that rally, he’d composed a song where he pleaded for the people to “go back to the old ways and seek where we got it wrong so that we can start from there to correct ourselves.” Even so, the editor of a local paper that has covered famo for years tells me Khuluoe was known as a leader of Seakhi, one of Lesotho’s most powerful famo gangs. He had murder charges against his name (his family says there was no evidence against him, and the case was later dropped) and, some allege, was a perpetrator of the type of violence he claimed he wanted to pacify.

Even the circumstances surrounding Khuluoe’s murder were suspicious. His family told the local press that the man responsible for his death was a gangster from a rival group who had been living in exile in South Africa. In October, two people were charged with the murders of Khuluoe and Macheli. Sources in the Lesotho Mounted Police Service say investigations into other suspects from rival gangs are ongoing.

If Khuluoe’s duality as a pacifist and an alleged gangster says anything, it is that famo has been infected by corrupt politics and criminal activity that threatens to destroy the music itself. 

Falling Into Famo

I heard famo for the first time in 2017, when I visited Lesotho while on a trip to South Africa. I crossed the southern border from Drakensberg National Park on the back of a sturdy pony. Through the craggy mountains and sprawling plateaus, I came across a small village and the embers of a raucous party. Men wrapped in thick blankets of different colors, denoting different regions of the country or musical factions, gathered in a gaggle. The men’s eyes were claret red from lack of sleep and excessive liquor, and they danced in a field with jet-black sticks called molamu, each approximately a meter long. In the middle of the party, an accordion player jigged among a group of young, unsteady revelers, rapping to the beat like an agitated auctioneer. 

Now, seven years later, in 2024, I hear that sound again at a market in the center of Maseru. A musician named Morena Leraba stands swigging beer under a corrugated iron awning, watching men play pool on a shabby blue-felt table at a shebeen, an informal licensed bar typical in South Africa and Lesotho. Over the past few years, Morena has become popular not only in Lesotho but also throughout Africa and even Europe by combining the sounds of famo, Afropop, and European dance music.

It’s hot at the smoky market, lined with shaky stalls and cramped barber shops and clogged with heavy exhaust fumes; the sun is a burnished copper disk. Wearing an off-white cap over short-cropped hair, Morena is of medium height and as thin as a needle. He looks on as a man dressed in a faded bucket hat, a tracksuit top, and jeans fiddles with a battered PA system. Suddenly, a beat crackles and thuds through the speaker. As the rhythm picks up, the man squeezes a maroon-colored accordion with broken keys that look like chipped teeth in a clean, white-toothed smile. He then starts proclaiming in Sesotho (Lesotho’s native language) to the thud of the music. The group behind him, previously playing pool, drinking, or staring into the abyss, suddenly stands up as if charmed by the music and starts dancing, crouching and bobbing their heads, and responding, like a chorus, to the lines of the singer.

Morena’s real name is Teboho Mochaoa. “Morena Leraba is my stage name,” he’d told me earlier. “It means ‘Lord Snare.’” He was raised in the southern Lesotho city of Mafeteng, the so-called birthplace of famo music, and grew up tending sheep in the hills outside of the city and immersing himself in his grandfather’s library; his grandfather was a preacher and collected books. “Most families weren’t educated back then, so that was quite rare,” he says. As a young boy, he stared at the pages of the books because he couldn’t read. He liked their feel and smell, the fact that they contained worlds that were not his own, and often made his sisters read to him. “I escaped through books.”

Morena’s curiosity about the world took him far beyond the fields of Mafeteng. After high school, he pursued journalism and worked as a freelance graphic designer in Cape Town, South Africa. This path set him apart from many of his peers, who often turned to illegal mining. Morena insists he is not part of any gang and has always been keen to avoid problems related to famo. “You choose to do it,” he says, referring to the gangs. “And you can choose to keep out of it as well.” Morena tells me he fell into the music by chance.

“YOU CHOOSE TO DO IT,” FAMO ARTIST MORENA SAYS OF THE GANGS. “AND YOU CAN CHOOSE TO KEEP OUT OF IT AS WELL.”

In 2011, he worked on social media marketing for a local band and found himself in the studio. One of the performers wanted a famo artist on the album. Morena joked, “Ah, I’m from Mafeteng.… I can drop a few bars.” The artist didn’t want to choose the wrong performer and cause trouble for himself. Choosing Morena, who had no gang affiliation, was a safe bet. “We ended up saying, ‘Hey, OK, give it a try,’” he tells me.

It was one of those serendipitous moments. Ten years later, Morena had European tours lined up, his particular take on famo won over foreign audiences but sometimes alienated the purists. “They just think it’s white music … like, it’s traditional lyrics on white music,” he says. But Morena hasn’t abandoned the music’s history. “I always imagine famo on a classical level, like hearing an old man singing traditional poetry on a mountain, accompanied by an orchestra.”

Indigenous Basotho (people of Lesotho heritage) musical traditions and old war poetry heavily influenced the early forms of famo. By the late 1800s, it had become the music of migrant workers, who often traveled to South Africa for employment in mines and farms. Modern famo is said to have emerged in the drinking dens of those mine workers. 

Beneath the metal awning, the man in the bucket hat slows the bellowing of his accordion so that it wheezes to silence. The dancing men resume their positions on the bench or at the pool table. Morena and I walk back to the market with the smells of grilled meat, gasoline, and drainage permeating the air. I tell Morena I’m meeting the so-called Queen of Famo later that afternoon. 

“You’re interviewing Puseletso Seema?” he asks in surprise. “I’ve never met her.” I say he should come along. Morena enthusiastically agrees.

Read the full story at: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/famo-music-lesotho-africa-1235200507/