Music of Botswana covers a broad spectrum of traditions, from the oldest surviving instruments in the archaeological record to contemporary artists whose work has reached international stages. Botswana is an African country made up of different ethnic groups, with the Batswana forming the majority of the population. Music is a large part of Botswana culture and includes popular and folk forms. Church choirs are common nationwide. The country's musical landscape reflects its history as a crossroads of southern African peoples, a British protectorate, a post-independence nation that built one of Africa's fastest-growing economies on diamond revenues, and a place where regional genres from South Africa and Central Africa have taken root alongside home-grown forms.
Ancient and pre-colonial instruments The oldest surviving instrument found in what is now Botswana is a seburuburu bullroarer made from bone, excavated from the Matlapaneng dig site and dated to approximately 1,000 years ago. A bone flute or whistle approximately 900 years old was uncovered at the Bosutswe site; it has a single opening that the player covers to vary pitch. Bone is the only material durable enough to have survived that long in the archaeological record, meaning earlier instruments almost certainly existed but have not been preserved.
Instruments were historically considered significant personal and communal property. Owners typically kept them for life, and some instruments were classified as community heritage that could not be sold without the approval of the chief. There was a religious dimension to them as well: both the materials used to make instruments and the blessings placed on them carried spiritual significance. Music was used in rainmaking rituals, in times of war, in protests against chiefly authority, and in ceremonies marking transitions in life including naming, initiation, puberty, marriage, and funerals. Doctors known as moroka ya pula burned medicines inside animal horns to produce smoke intended to bring rain.
Of the charms carried by Tswana men in the 19th century to ward off evil, one was a whistle used as an alert to danger.
Traditional music
Tswana musical forms Traditional folk songs are the most well known form of music to originate from Botswana, particularly those of the Tswana people. Traditional Tswana songs are built on a pentatonic scale and typically have a short melodic range of less than one octave. They are structured around call and response: a lead singer begins and is followed by other singers, either repeating the melody or offering a balancing response. The exchange repeats, sometimes for several minutes. As Setswana is a tone language, tonal variation carries meaning and is woven into musical performance, particularly in combination with flutes. Diatonic structures became more common as the music absorbed foreign influences over time.
Dance in Botswana is inseparable from traditional music. Traditional dances involve movement of the entire body, and many instruments require deliberate, complex movement to play properly, particularly instruments involving rattles worn on the legs or ankles. Facial expression is also considered part of the performance.
Different song types are associated with specific social contexts. Play songs use staccato sounds made through clapping or rattles. Rite of passage songs carry messages about adolescence, innocence, and chastity, with girls' songs often featuring the moropa drum. War songs traditionally incorporate a motlhatswa whistle or a lepatata horn. Healing dances, called phekolo, are still performed in contemporary Botswana, though they have migrated from the traditional kgotla space in the village centre to more private settings and use newer songs rather than historical repertoire.
Community singing is a core Batswana musical tradition, performed either in age groups or along gender lines, usually a cappella or with minimal instrumentation. Among the San and other groups, music has historically been used to imitate animal sounds including bird calls and, through bowstring technique, the sound of hoofbeats. Some Batswana women are able to ululate, a trilling sound used as a form of cheering.
Traditional instruments The regional variation in Botswana's traditional instruments reflects both the country's geography and the diversity of its peoples. The more densely populated eastern areas have different traditions from the western Kalahari region, and each ethnic community maintains its own instrumental customs.
Percussion Matlhowa are rattles worn on the leg or ankle, traditionally made from over one hundred cocoons soaked, filled with pebbles or seeds, dried, and tied to a string. Other rattles were made using the ears of springboks. Wooden clappers and marapo hand clappers made from bone are also used. Clapping is central to Tswana and San performance traditions, typically at a beat of 4/4 or 2/4, and was historically considered the role of women in communal songs.
Drums are less common in Setswana folk music than in most other African traditions, a consequence of the difficulty of finding trees large enough to supply materials in the Kalahari Desert. The only drum type found in traditional Setswana music is the moropa, which can be made from a tree trunk, a milk jug, or a can. Modern drums in Botswana are often two-sided, made of a short metal cylinder wrapped in cowhide. The Kalanga people use drums more frequently than other peoples of Botswana. The Mbukushu use friction drums played by rubbing a reed against the drumhead. The Herero people use a two-sided ongoma beaten with sticks. The Kgatla people began using drums for women's bojale initiation ceremonies in 1871.
The setinkane, a thumb piano, has been one of the most widely played folk instruments in Botswana since the mid-twentieth century and has been popularised among the San by musicians including !Kaha. String
Musical bows are common string instruments, including the lengope, the nkokwane, the segwana, and the mafata-iswaneng. Different bows are resonated through the mouth, a gourd, a tin can, or through the ground. Vocalisation and string instruments make up the largest portion of Setswana folk music. The segankuru, or segaba, is held on the shoulder using a wire and played with a bow in a circular motion, resembling a violin. It uses a bow lined with cow's tail hair and a tin can as resonator, and is the most commonly encountered folk instrument in modern Setswana music. The lesiba, also called a kwadi or gora, blends wind and string by putting a mouthpiece onto a quill run through the length of the bow. The San play the quashi, a bow-like lute, and also used an instrument with four to seven strings known by several names including daukashe and dzoma, played sitting with the resonator facing inward.
Wind Wind instruments traditionally served practical roles such as communication between herders, calling cattle, summoning spirits, and warning of attack. Traditional wind instruments are often made of bone, reed, or animal horn. The lengwane and the motlhatswa, made from goat bone and a hollowed tree branch respectively, are blown across the top. The lepapata, made by soaking the horn of a greater kudu or a sable antelope in hot water to shape it, was used by the Tswana people for celebrations and warnings of attack. Reed flutes included the short high-pitched mpenyane and the low-pitched meporo, which could be nearly six feet long. Metal flutes replaced reed flutes during the twentieth century. Unlike the peoples of central Africa, the peoples of Botswana were never known to have used side-blown ivory horns.
Dikhwaere Dikhwaere is a traditional Setswana choral music and dance genre in which groups perform combined singing and choreographed movement. It is most strongly associated with the Kgatleng region and other southern parts of Botswana. The word khwaere is a loanword from the English word "choir". Dikhwaere choirs perform at cultural festivals, land celebrations during the festive season, and national events. Since the introduction of the President's Day Arts Competition, it has also become a competitive form generating financial prizes. The Dikopelo Folk Music of Bakgatla ba Kgafela, the closely related tradition of the Bakgatla ba Kgafela community, has been recognised by UNESCO as an element of intangible cultural heritage. Dr Vom (Kangangwani Mogocha), born in 1977 in the North East District, is the most prominent contemporary recording artist in the dikhwaere genre. His 2007 song "Tsaya Thobane", recorded in collaboration with the Rangers Marena Choir from Artesia, became a fixture at national sporting events and cultural gatherings to the degree that it is described in Botswana media as an unofficial national anthem. At the 50T050 celebrations of Botswana's fifty years of independence in 2016, Dr Vom was pulled on stage without announcement and the crowd sang along to the full performance, after which the Gaborone District Commissioner led a 5-kilometre march continuing the song.
Colonial period and early recording Beginning in the 19th century, immigrants from the United Kingdom began arriving in large numbers and called the colony Bechuanaland. European missionaries arriving in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenged the close link between traditional music and indigenous spiritual practice, and the norms introduced by colonial administration substantially ended many daily musical traditions. The missionaries' lack of interest in documenting traditional music meant it was recorded less thoroughly than other topics of the period. Christian denominations that developed natively, like the Zion Christian Church, incorporate native healing songs in their practices.
As Botswana's education system expanded in the 1950s, choir was widely taught and became a popular competitive activity. The Brown Kalanga Wizards were the first recording group from the territory that is now Botswana, forming in the 1950s and producing two albums. Traditional folk music experienced a resurgence as part of Botswana's independence movement and the construction of a national identity during the same decade.
Post-independence and radio National radio broadcasts began in the 1960s, with choir and folk singing the most common genres on air. The folk singer and segaba player Ratsie Setlhako was one of the most prominent post-independence musicians, performing at most national events from Botswana's independence in 1966 until his death in 1976.
Botswana was one of the first African countries to develop a hip hop following as the genre arrived in the early 1980s. Traditional music saw a resurgence with the musical group Mogwana in 1991. South African music, including kwaito and motswako, spread into Botswana following the end of Apartheid in 1994 and open cross-border cultural exchange.
The Botswana Telecommunications Authority began issuing private radio broadcasting licences in 1998. Yarona FM and Gabz FM both launched in 1999. Yarona FM, which started broadcasting on 22 August 1999, was the first independent radio station in the country and initially covered Gaborone within a 50-kilometre radius before receiving a national broadcast licence in June 2007. It was awarded the Botswana Music Awards for Best Radio Station in 2008 and 2009. Its programming focused primarily on RnB, hip hop, motswako, and pop, and it has been one of the principal platforms through which new Botswana music has reached young audiences nationally. South African jazz, kwaito, and hip hop became the major popular genres in Botswana by the late 1990s, with hip hop overtaking kwaito to become the country's most popular music genre by approximately 2003.
Hip hop and motswako