Can Famo Music Survive Lesotho’s Gang Wars?

I
n 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.

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Lesotho is a country of slightly more than 2 million people, with a laid-back king known to hang out at bars by himself, according to locals, 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.

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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.

The Queen

To reach Seema’s village, we drive through sprawling brown-green grasslands and flat-topped mountains, which look like gargantuan bricks placed in the landscape. 

We arrive at the edge of a village about 30 minutes from Maseru, and walk to a squat gray house. Inside, everything is cream and white: cream tile floors and whitewashed walls. Two large black speakers loom in the corner beside Seema, who sits on a leather couch, her heavy frame slumped like a wet tea bag on the squeaky brown cushions. Now in her late seventies, she wears a headscarf, a blue tunic, and pink slip-on sneakers. Seema doesn’t speak English, so Morena and a rapper and producer, Thulo, translate for me. (Thulo and Morena call Seema “Mama” out of respect and affection when speaking to her.)

Seema was born in 1949 and grew up between Soweto, a large metropolitan area on the outskirts of Johannesburg, and rural Lesotho. From a young age, she was unlike most girls — working as a shepherd and often stick fighting with local boys. She had completed only a few years of formal education when she started singing at 12. Her family was always against her passion. Music was for people without ambition, they always told her, “like it’s backwards,” she says.

At 15, she was raped by her then-boyfriend. Her family’s reaction was severe; they blamed her, attributing it to her love of singing, which, she’s said in the past, they somehow linked to promiscuity. In the mid-Sixties, she eloped with a man who worked in a mine in KwaZulu-Natal, crossing the border to settle in Mahobong in northern Lesotho. Her first child died in infancy, and when she was pregnant with her second daughter, in 1970, her husband passed away. Rejected by her in-laws and her own family, Seema was driven to the mines, where she sold beer and food and ultimately joined a gang for protection and a semblance of belonging. Music never left her.

Though she recorded her first album in 1973, she sang in Zulu, not Sesotho, her native tongue. “Famo music was seen as inferior and less cultured back then,” she says. That all changed after her brother’s death in the early 1980s. She couldn’t sing about real pain and anguish in a second language. “Now,” she recalls, “I’m going to sing in my own language.” So, Seema composed famo songs in her native Sesotho, and her music became more focused on daily life — anguish, joy, work, and nature. In one song, “Boleng Ba Lekhulo,” she encourages farmers and shepherds all over Lesotho to take better care of the land so that the land can better care for their animals. “Fellow Basotho people, take care of the grazing velds and keep them in good condition,” she sings.

Famo musicians seldom bother with pen and paper. Their craft is about memory. They relay stories to the audience, mastering the narrative through performance — superimposing the most recent rendition of a song on the previous version, like a sort of oral palimpsest. 

This storytelling prowess is known as likheleke, or “wordsmithing.” Many fans of famo believe Seema is one of the best wordsmiths, and her skills have led her to become one of the most famous recording artists in Lesotho and South Africa, which, in an ­industry traditionally ruled by men, is no mean feat. 

But none of these accomplishments insulated her from further tragedy. In the following years, she lost two more husbands to gang violence. She says she was also consistently ripped off by merciless record labels, promoters, and producers. She never made the money that she thought was due to her. It was common for her to travel to South Africa to the offices of these producers and promoters and threaten them with a gun. 

Seema tells me famo has always had its adversarial side. Back then, people fought for sport and who was the best wordsmith. “There was violence in these factions when they were fighting. But it wasn’t so much with guns.… It was more sticks and stones,” she says. In the following years, though, things would change.

By the mid-1990s, many South African gold mines closed because they were no longer profitable. The remaining low-quality gold was buried deep and was expensive to extract. Thousands of miners, many Basotho people, and many famo musicians were now unemployed. But where multinationals saw ruin, organized crime saw an opportunity. Gangs like the Marashea moved in. 

The Marashea, composed mainly of migrants from Lesotho, emerged during apartheid South Africa as powerful criminal organizations involved in racketeering, assassinations, and other illicit activities. They offered protection and employment to fellow Lesotho migrants, often in conflict with rival migrant gangs, which controlled South Africa’s illegal-mining sector.

At the same time, famo music was gaining popularity across southern Africa. Advances in recording technology and increased radio play expanded the genre’s reach. In the early 2000s, performers like Chakela and Lekase rose to prominence. As their followings grew, these musicians formed factions of fellow musicians and fans. Chakela formed a group called Terene ea Chakela (which would later evolve into Terene ea Mokata), and Lekase formed Seakhi to support himself and his community of musicians and fans, not unlike a trade union.

However, not long after these groups expanded and their leaders’ popularity grew, they began to intersect with the criminal world. Performers like Lekase and Chakela would compete not just for radio play but also for control over the genre’s growing number of fans, many of whom worked in illegal gold mining in South Africa and had ties to the Marashea or other criminal enterprises.

“YOU JUST NEVER KNOW WHO’S LISTENING, SO YOU DON’T PLAY FAMO AT ALL,” SAYS FAMO ARTIST TSEPANG MAKAKOLE.

In essence, the musicians leveraged their popularity with their fans to enter into the criminal underworld, where there were more opportunities to make money and have power. Slowly, the focus of these groups allegedly shifted from music to territorial control, extortion, and violence, with famo factions evolving into gangs. The music, in effect, became branding. Just as narco corridos reflect the violent world of drug cartels, famo music channels the lives of Basotho men entangled in gang rivalries, poverty, and a ceaseless fight for respect and control. In one song, Kholopo Khuluoe, as Lisuoa, addresses Lesotho’s king directly, telling him about the violence and how it needs to stop: “In our past, we used sticks and canes, not Western weapons like bombs and guns. Even when things were bad, there was no blood, it wouldn’t be spilled so carelessly.”

Seema tells me she often feels incredulous about how complicated and violent things have become since the rise of Terene and Seakhi, each of which have what is likely hundreds of thousands of members today. Every year, the situation gets a little worse. Everyone is suspicious of everyone, and nobody is loyal to anyone, Seema says, shifting on the squeaky leather couch to get up. “I can’t say, ‘My son, you are wrong.’ Because immediately when that ends and everything seems calm, when I turn around, they’ll off me.” 

The conversation moves to the front yard. Seema sits on a chair, a shawl over her shoulders, listening to Morena and Thulo talk about music. They bounce around her like giddy young children. Morena shows Seema videos of his latest performances and excitedly awaits her approval.

The old woman, though, stares at the screen, the shadow of a smile curled into her lips and a frown barely creasing her forehead. Morena explains the thinking behind each song — taking his phone from her to adjust the volume or the backlighting. “I want to show her another song,” he says with a grin.

We stay there talking until the sun lowers behind the ragged mountains.

Growing Violence

Almost as soon as I’d crossed the border from South Africa to the kingdom of Lesotho — before having checked into the hotel or listened to one note from an accordion — I saw firsthand how complicated things had become. Jem, a local fixer, and I had decided to buy SIM cards. We pulled into a shiny modern mall in central Maseru with a pristine parking lot that contrasted with the dusty, potholed roads in town. Out of nowhere, a man in a black-and-white-striped rugby jersey with a machine gun slung from his shoulder lunged in front of the car, arms waving, motioning us to move away. 

What he didn’t want us interrupting was an arrest. In front of us, a group of men dressed in civilian clothes — carrying pistols and AK-47s — crowded around two apprehended subjects pinned to the ground. Behind us, a line of taxi drivers hollered as the police rummaged through the suspects’ belongings. They cheered and booed, as if they were watching a soccer game. At the same time, shoppers entered and exited stores, holding bags filled with groceries, ignoring the commotion outside.

Three days later, I tell this story to Tsepang Makakole, a famo artist and president of the Lesotho Music Association, over dinner at a Portuguese restaurant in central Maseru. Makakole is unsurprised; he’d read about it on a local news blog. He pulls up the article on his phone, and we translate it: “Authorities claim that five men suspected of being blankets (gangsters) were arrested today at noon at the Maseru Mall.” The report is unclear about why the men had been arrested and mentions the kidnapping and murders of five family members in the north of the country, which were still unsolved.

Makakole, a busy man, talks to me between calls from his wife, a Zoom with the Lesotho Music Association, and the intermittent chiming of his WhatsApp. He says he’s witnessed the violence worsen over the past two decades. He remembers that when the gangs first formed, violence existed but killings were rare. Things changed when they started making money from illegal gold mining, corrupting law enforcement, and accessing illicit weapons. Gradually, the famo factions intersected with the Marashea criminal infrastructure — taking charge of illegal mining, long-distance taxi businesses, recycling, and stock theft on both sides of the border. 

Famo gangs structured themselves like organized-crime syndicates. In the case of Terene, power is centralized. There is ­usually one leader, often a famo musician, who recruits followers. Beneath him are lieutenants who manage daily operations, while enforcers carry out violent acts against rival factions. Foot soldiers, many of whom are fans of the music, or musicians themselves, participate in territorial control, carrying out assassinations and robberies. Seakhi, on the other hand, follows a franchise-like model. Each group (there are about 12 today) has its own leader and followers and operates semi-independently but under one banner.

And from 2009 onward, these factions were at war. Hits were taken out against high-ranking members on both sides, and the respective leaders, Chakela and Lekase, hid in South Africa. One contemporary news article cited an unofficial report that more than 100 people were murdered in famo feuds around that time. In 2015, high-ranking Lesotho government officials called for famo music to be banned altogether. 

These days, Makakole tells me, the gang landscape is a bewildering array of dozens of group names. The formation of new groups and internal wars in the Terene faction have spread violence throughout Lesotho and South Africa. “It’s sad because everyone is involved, probably up to the minister level. Everyone is being corrupted by it,” he says.

The violence has also become far more brutal. Tankiso Makhetha, a general senior reporter at News24, a South African news outlet, who has followed famo violence for years, tells me, “They fight over lucrative mines in South Africa, and their violence is always targeted and designed to send a message. It’s a turf war.” Indeed, it was common to hear stories about how the gangs would kill an entire, often innocent family to lure an enemy to a funeral, where they would then take him out. 

“You just never know who’s listening, so you don’t play famo at all,” Makakole says, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

Living With Threats

The next day, this danger becomes clear in the sound booth of a radio station in Mafeteng. A DJ dressed in a green T-shirt, black jeans, and Nike high-tops is talking about how difficult his job has become.

“I’ve received death threats so many times,” the DJ (who doesn’t want to be named for fear of reprisals) tells me. Still, one day, a few years back, stands out in his mind ­— the day he played the wrong song too many times.

It happened like this: A local gang boss called him at the radio station that evening. The boss was angry. He said the DJ was taking sides by playing too much of a rival’s music.

While driving home that night, the DJ didn’t see the car with armed men following him. He didn’t see when they pulled up outside of his house. And he didn’t see them cocking their guns. The DJ only realized what was happening when they barged through the front door, locking him inside at gunpoint. There, they stood eerily silent, aiming their pistols but not shooting. 

Then he saw why the men had frozen. The DJ’s young daughter had crept into the room. She stepped between him and the gunmen. “She put her hands up, so they couldn’t do anything,” he says. The men lingered for a few more moments and then left. 

When the DJ thinks about it now, he feels relief. But a question still nags him when he’s in front of the microphone in his small, cramped sound booth in the dusty parking lot. They’d killed families before. Why didn’t they kill him and his daughter that night? 

But this is the world he lives in now. The gangs hijacked famo and sucked in all of society. “They even kill kids,” he says.

In recent years, politicians and famo factions have become natural allies. Politicians will even launch their parties with the same colors as those of a particular famo group and invite them to play music at rallies. Associating with a specific act can win votes for the politicians; for the famo gangs, it often protects them from prosecution. The favors have been known to extend beyond vote winning.

In 2017, former Prime Minister Thomas Thabane was put on trial for killing his first wife. While the prime minister was charged with orchestrating the crime, one of the men who authorities suspected pulled the trigger was, in fact, one of the Terene gang’s leaders, a man known as Lehlanya — “The Madman.” Ultimately, the former prime minister and Lehlanya, whose real name is Sarel Sello, were cleared of any wrongdoing. Still, their acquittal occurred under highly suspicious circumstances when one of the critical witnesses for the prosecution went missing.

I’d learned about Lehlanya before setting foot on the plane to Lesotho. He was a famous famo musician, but was perhaps more famous as a powerful lieutenant to Chakela of the Terene faction. But there was more: The car I’d happened to rent to drive to Mafeteng had been the one in which, the owner suspected, the prime minister’s wife had been killed. “The 12 bullet holes in the door were telling,” the car’s owner said in an email in February. 

The DJ tells me he knows Lehlanya. He says he might organize an interview for me, but I’d have to give him some time. 

When I show up the following day, the DJ directs me to the back of his steaming-hot car with my notebook. He says it will be a phone call. Lehlanya is not in the country. I shout into a telephone while the DJ and my driver translate. The phone signal keeps cutting out. 

Lehlanya is evasive. When asked about the mines, he seems to deny any connection between his “group” and illegal mining, at least at the leadership level. He says people in mining are just trying to help their families. He also shoots down any notion of governmental complicity. “Are these groups bribing government officials?” he repeats. “They’re just busy with their own businesses. Nothing to do with the government.”

I change tack and ask him about his alleged involvement in the former prime minister’s wife’s assassination and a massacre in a Johannesburg tavern in 2022, for which he’d also been accused. Before I do so, I warn the DJ — will this question endanger him? He smiles. “It should be fine.”

Lehlanya’s tone is evident. He says that all the wrongs have been “put on his head” and that he’s not a fugitive, because he’s here in Lesotho as a “free man.” The criminal allegations are all speculation, he says. “Deep down, I know I didn’t do anything.”

There is evidence contradicting Lehlanya’s protests. For one, there are posters featuring that day’s Lesotho Times plastered throughout the capital. They scream, “Famo leader warns of bloodbath.” In the article, a leader of Lehlanya’s group warns the country to prepare for more bloodshed because the government has failed to rein in security forces, which he accuses of fomenting rivalries by siding with particular gangs. Senior government officials and a local chief later tell me that the authorities are complicit in the famo gangs’ rise to prominence. A high-ranking politician close to the king tells me, “There are even government ministers involved with the famo gangs.”

The same government official says making any positive change would be difficult, especially when the army and the police often supply gangs with guns. Even officials who gangs haven’t corrupted are part of hopelessly underresourced departments. One police officer tells me they have no means to patrol the vast rural area they oversee; their car has broken down, and their only horse is lame.

Senior Superintendent Mopeli of the Lesotho Mounted Police Service tells me, “We’re working with the army and security services to target these groups.” He also mentions they are aware of corruption in the security services and are taking steps to arrest or dismiss suspected officers from the force. (A spokesperson for the South African Police Service didn’t respond by press time.)

The king’s adviser believes the situation will not improve until unemployment is reduced and more young men are given opportunities to earn a living. “An empty stomach won’t listen [to reason],” he says.

The Legacy

Mahali has this memory: In April 2024, her father was performing in a big, open concert in Maseru. “Tsatsi la Botlokotsebe” (“Day of Crime”) was playing. The crowd loved the song, and Mahali loved it, too: “He mentions that Friday is the day of fun and crimes. People must go have fun outside, but they must also be on the lookout for goons.”

For Mahali, despite all of the speculation about her father’s involvement in crime, it was a song that summed him up — his love of fun, but his hope for peace. Her father had been a man driven by dangerous idealism — an idealism that, Mahali feels, killed him. And while she tells me she hasn’t received any direct death threats, she knows some people wouldn’t mind shutting her up. “I still don’t feel safe. I’m still scared of what might happen to me,” she tells me over the phone this fall.

Her father’s example was powerful. A “totem has fallen,” she’d said at his funeral. Unlike many others I spoke to for this article, Mahali was willing to talk because she felt she had no choice; she had to fight her grief for her father, for famo, by trying to live as he had.

Khuluoe believed music could transcend all of its problems, and that it could matter more than violence. “[I’m going] to work hard and show them that I’m still here — that the legacy is still gonna survive.”