In Most Maseru Clubs Deejaying has become a Contagious Art of Repetition

One balmy summer, I shadowed a famous Maseru DJ—and I use the word ‘fame’ generously—so he could teach me how to become a DJ. Fame in Lesotho is a debatable concept, because you could be a famous person but still live in communal duplexes. This might sound ludicrous to anyone outside Lesotho, where fame directly translates into actual money, but this is a country that exists in the fault-lines of contradiction. Here, you could be famous and still have to take public transport. You can pass about five ‘famous’ people every other day when you go buy your groceries at Pioneer Mall.

More than Deejaying seeming to be a rite of passage for the delusional young male with a faint understanding of BPMs, and a glaring side effect of Lesotho’s unemployment crisis, I confess, I had more altruistic reasons for my brief foray into the world of USBs and CDJs. Maybe you can call it a sickness, the desire to fix the country through its music, but who can live in a country like Lesotho and not feel in some irreparable way, profoundly sick?

There’s an urban saying that the health of the economy of any country can be seen in its strip clubs. The health of a country's GDP relies in wads of its currency stacked between a thong and the trembling cellulite-rich thighs of a dancer named Crystal. Strippers are the first heralds of economic crises, once their customers stop coming in, news of a recession is soon to follow.

Although Lesotho has no strip clubs ( however, careful digging into the history of some Maseru establishments in the 70s would prove otherwise), there was a club, for those with not-so-short memories, where women danced half-naked in cages.  The epitome of club culture, it seems, is to treat women as if they are meat. Every ‘Ladies Night’ is a euphemism for a butchery, where women’s bodies are displayed, naked or clothed, for the hungry eyes of pot-bellied men.

A country like Lesotho, perhaps, is best when it exists in the fault-lines, not yet at the finishing point of true self-actualisation, but not in the womb of conception either. It’s in the hopeful feeling you get in knowing that something life-altering could happen in a near future. It hasn’t happened yet, but that sense of being in-between is a self-contained universe on its own. Tilted to any direction, left or right, could spell doom or glory. Perhaps it’s better to be in the middle, not yet at the end, but not at the beginning also.

Maybe that is the story of Lesotho. In an era where women danced half-naked in cages, Lesotho had hovered in a state of  decline of an old government. Sam Matekane, from a Canaan made of money,  had not yet appeared on the scene with hopes of a new revolution. But the revolution's whispers were felt nonetheless. Something, at some point in this descent that Lesotho was faithfully going down, had to give.

However, I will be the first to say, a club where they put people in cages was the most exciting thing to happen to its nightlife in a long time, dehumanisation aside. Everything that came afterwards spelled a downward spiral. You can go into any club in Maseru right now, both in town and on the outskirts, and swear they were playing from the same USB, with the exception of a handful (I had recently been impressed by DJ Allegro’s unique drum-infused sets for example). The list is endless, but I will give a few examples from the tenets they swear religiously by:

1. Millionaire - Kelis, Andre 3000

2. All I Do Is Win - DJ Khaled

3. Knock You Down - Keri Hilson, Ne-Yo, Kanye West

Finally, with the aims to save Lesotho, I visited this DJ on a Sunday morning because he had a gig the day before and told me that he would only be waking up at about 12pm. I arrived at his duplex just before then, and as I knocked at his door, it wasn’t him that greeted me, but a girl wearing nothing but red lingerie and a pipe of hubbly in her hand which she expelled from her nostrils as if she was a dragon. The space was cramped, the hubbly sat on top of a couch that was placed right next to the door. Completing this magazine cover of discount Architectural Digest was a small table behind the couch, and behind that, the fridge. I guessed that these were the perils of living in communal duplexes.

I assumed they had just come from ‘sexy-time’ as couples in duplexes are prone to do. They say the less money you have to rent a single house, the less money you have to afford privacy, or even shame. But she explained to me that they were shooting content for social media. Having a brief talk with him, he explained that these days, simply Deejaying was not enough, that to truly become a successful DJ in Lesotho, you had to become a personality. The art of Deejaying itself was not important….what was important was your presentation outside of Deejaying itself, or how much engagement you get on your social media posts. Gone are the days when DJs could exist in symbiosis with the creators of the music themselves, where, an up-and-coming musician, could have their career blow up because a DJ took a chance on them and spun their songs on dance floors, leading to the artist’s discovery by a wider audience.  

These are the days of the ‘content creator’. Gone are the days when dance, and club-going could seem like an out-of-body experience, a place to go to experience something bigger than yourself. Or meet your ‘special one’. So many babies were made to Sea Bee’s ‘Homeboy’, or Brenda Fassie’s ‘Weekend Special’,  and it was because of the DJs. They were gods of romance and artists in their own right.

I like to think of myself, and although this is an affliction that befalls any formerly gifted child, as somewhat of an artist. The artist’s role, as James Baldwin said, is the same as that of a lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. And Maseru DJs, I love you the most, my heart pumps butterflies for you. 

I was open-minded enough to let him start me off on the basics. I had already got them, a few months prior, through YouTube tutorials and practicing on the Virtual DJ on my computer but hadn’t touched a CDJ proper. More than that, I thought it would be an enriching experience, in my search for a personal signature, to be influenced by someone more experienced than me, and perhaps, with a well-defined signature of their own. He taught me about beat matching, and extending loops on songs, and different tempo changing techniques, but it wasn’t until our fifth lesson together that I noticed that something was terribly wrong. All the songs he taught me with, and I kid you not, were, in no particular order:

1. Millionaire - Kelis, Andre 3000

2. All I Do Is Win - DJ Khaled

3. Knock You Down - Keri Hilson, Ne-Yo, Kanye West

I withheld my reservations. He was, after all, my teacher, and I have always been told not to revolt against educational institutions, a result of my docile, Mokhotlong mother who was scared of authority. Plus, as much as music was my vehicle for the coup d’etat, it was still a new art form to me, unlike words. He told me that once I started playing my gigs proper, it didn’t matter how I constructed my set-list, these were the songs that had to be in there. The mark of a good DJ, he said, was playing songs that everyone knew. These songs were already entrenched in Basotho’s collective consciousness. The worst thing you could do as a DJ was try to be a hero.

When eventually I got my first gig, (I would be accompanying him to play a short set before his), it wasn’t the idea of playing in front of a crowd that agitated me. It was the idea of building my set around these stale songs.

And that’s how, on my way to his gig with him and his girlfriend in his Elgrand van, the profound sickness that comes from living in Maseru suddenly visited me again. It was a feeling like sinking in the fault-lines, nauseous, cloying, as if I was made of a formless substance that was inhaled by all those who approached me as a poison. As much as Lesotho can exist in contradictions, perhaps it’s the lack of a collective central principal that contributes to a sickness like mine. We are all sinking. Not even RFP’s birthday-cake lights blaring in the inner city can keep the sickness at bay. We are sinking in mediocrity, driven to accept half-formed, inchoate creations as ‘art’.

Why for example, should we be so excited about the bare minimum; lights in the city? It’s a pervasive sickness, and the worst part is that this is a Frankenstein’s monster we allow to walk among us unfettered. You can see it anywhere you look, throw a stone in any direction, near or far, in the art exhibitions, in the music releases, or what passes, I guess, in Lesotho for ‘cinema’, and that stone would land on the monster of mediocrity. We have a sickness called ‘Good Enough for Lesotho’, it grabs and eats everything, its deformed fingerprints cover our national television broadcaster, which, by the way, watching any program on it warrants the volume button on your remote useless, because they increase and decrease the volume as they please. You can see it in the crazed defending of the very basic minimum our new government does. When you have been parched in the desert any little drop of water will taste like a river.

I thought of the futile task of making people dance with songs that sounded like they came from a 13 year old’s Samsung E250 in 2008—who, in their right music-loving mind would hold DJ Khaled as a bastion for showing people a good time? The sickness continued until we reached the club we were to play at. It was because of this that I implemented my coup-d’etat, I would deal with the consequences after. There was a roar building up inside me. I would not play DJ Khaled, and I would not be ‘knocking anyone down’ that night. This is the form that my revolution would take.

1. Le Freak - CHIC

2. We Can Dance - Chicco

3. Phuma (Bad Self) - Muzi

4. Peacock - Splash

5. Lithebera - Kashaka ft. Morena Leraba

6. Say Captain Say Wot - Captain Jack

7. I Feel Love - Donna Summer

8. Bruises - Kelela

9. Joy Bypass - SEI SIREN

10. Drumming - DJ Lag

11. Isende Lendlela - Faka ft. Surreal Sessions

12. G.O.A.T - Charlotte Devaney

13. Au Dede - Lebo Mathosa

14. I’m Free - Fistaz Mixwell, DJ Hloni, Mellow Soul

15. Summer Daze - Nick Holder

16. Gumba Fire (Madlakadlaka) - Ashiko

17. My Brother - The Survivals

18.  Do Better (The Layabouts Vocal Mix) - The Layabouts, Portia Monique

My revolution fell upon that night like a fever-dream. As the MC prowled around the dance-floor, acting as a hype-man to both myself and the dancers there, I drowned out his incessant noise with the disco-glittery sounds of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. He must have, at some point, found offence in this, or been hypnotized by Donna’s silky voice, because I noticed that the ‘Yebo yebo yebos,’ had been quiet for a while, and now he was making his way towards my booth with a disco-light tinged scowl on his face. I slipped in Kelela’s ‘Bruises’, and saw people’s hands touch their waists, gyrating, shadows moving in a sea of other shadows. The sudden shift in energy must have dissuaded him, so he never reached my booth.

I threw a glance at my DJ teacher and his girlfriend where they were sitting in the VIP section, but through hubbly smoke, I could see his eyes narrowed at me and a frown on his face. I didn’t care. I slipped in Nick Holder’s ‘Summer Daze’ and watched people’s eyes close as waves of nostalgia beat upon them like waves upon a sandy shore, again, and again and again, until they were left with nothing  but the impulse to surrender to the spell I was casting with just my hands, and these songs, and this art these musicians had created especially for me, especially for a night like this, with people like this, in a city like this, I swear, sometimes, it’s moments like this that make living in Lesotho worthwhile, that make being alive worthwhile, being young, and free, and incandescent, filled with the desire to penetrate through the night to reach something that will fill even your darkest days with an eternal glow.

Why can’t our DJs understand that this is something bigger than themselves, it’s like harnessing magic, the magic of music, the magic of love, in the middle of ‘Summer Daze’, I spied two people in the dim corner kissing, melting into each other, becoming each other, and I knew, and I hoped, that later that night, they would make a baby, and perhaps, name the baby after me, if only to make this moment last forever, create some meaningful monument against this dumb, wretched city, a souvenir to this night where at least for a while, the curse of mediocrity was lifted, and people forgot themselves, and then I slipped in Ashiko’s ‘Gumba Fire’, and followed it with The Survivals’ ‘My Brother’, and I knew, that even if my revolution wasn’t successful, for a moment, a glimpse, at least someone had touched it.

When my set was over I was called into a ‘meeting’ in the Elgrand in the parking lot of the club. I watched people stumbling home drunk through the car’s black tinted windows. I heard their voices made hoarse and feral by alcohol, and they were so loud their shouting seemed to rip holes in the calm of the morning. Cab drivers were out by seemingly their thousands to take these dizzy denizens of the night home. In the distance, sunrise was imminent, its ember glow already touching the outline of Maseru.

To my surprise, him and his girlfriend weren’t the only ones there. Squinting in the darkness, I made out the faces of some other men, about four of them, and realised later that these were some other ‘famous’ Lesotho DJs in their own right. I wondered if they lived in duplexes too. My teacher, after a brief silence, said to me, ‘You fucked up big-time bro! I told you to only play songs people knew! You think you’re a know-it-all?’

There was no defending myself. I knew what I was doing, even during my set, that after that, I would not be allowed to DJ again. At least not in this city. One of the DJs, in broken English, and I recognised him as not only a DJ, but an event organiser and chef as well, (I finally saw what my teacher meant when he said DJs had to become personalities too, no matter how bland those ‘personalities’ were), said that what I had done was not ‘good for his mental health’.

After a brief silence, the girlfriend spoke. “I don’t think it was that bad” she said, with a half-apologetic smile, “I liked some of those songs”. My teacher gave her a look that hinted at an oncoming break up, or at least, a sabbatical from their content creation. They forced me to hand over my USB, the understanding being that it was the weapon of terror. I pictured them smashing it on the ground later.

I had no regrets. Why would I? Suddenly I didn’t feel sick anymore. I wanted to hold on to that feeling for the rest of my life, because I had finally reached ‘the glow’ I had been searching for. They said that I would have to find my own way home, and left me in the slowly thinning crowd of Maseru’s party goers. With a smile on my face, I decided to forego the cabs that morning, and walk home instead. I was accompanied by their incessant hooting, and the wails of drunkards, and the sad, rheumy eyes of the old women in the street who from last night, and until this early morning, resisted the throbbing protests from their tired limbs to sell sheep’s head and pap and chicken legs to the city’s party-goers, and their endless appetites for something, anything, bigger than what existed in the humdrum of their lives.