With New Single ‘Koababa’, Morena Sway Finds the Sound of a New Chapter

Morena Sway is a lover. Not only in the romantic way one would expect, but in a broader way that speaks to how love in all its forms can fuel us in our respective careers and lives. It was love that informed his decision to halt his career just at the moment it had been gaining momentum with the song ‘I Swear’, after heeding the call from his late mother to come back home and finish school. Love is the theme in most of his output, with the smash hit ‘Sematsatsa’ being his introduction to Basotho and his unique Sesotho Afro-Beats sound. ‘Lerato’, his previous album is inspired by his mother.

Now he is poised to sing about love in a different way. With his new single ‘Koababa’, Morena Sway is starting a new chapter and exploring a new sound. Though still with an Afro-Beats sound at its base, Koababa fuses these influences with Amapiano as well. The song also speaks, in a tongue-in-cheek way, of the more vunerable side of love; wanting to express your feelings to someone but being scared to do so. But upon meeting him, it becomes clear that it is not only the exciting terrains of new sounds that Morena Sway is skirting…he is on the verge of a re-birth as well.

We meet in an area where the city of Maseru ends, as the buildings give way to long stretches of mostly unused land. One drives there for quite a while before factories start popping up at all sides, and a welcome silence from the constant hooting of Maseru’s 4+1s and taxis settles around. But the building where I meet Morena Sway for our conversation is different. Air-conditioned rooms and plaques on the walls from various artists, events, and awards characterise the space; the kind of place where the trajectory of an artist’s career is plotted meticulously. When he arrives, there is an undeniable sense that someone special has entered the room; everyone’s eyes immediately turn to him. He is waited upon; without him, the show can’t start. He leads me to a room with plush cushions and purple lighting to have our conversation in. Throughout the conversation, the sense that we are in a music video is inescapable.

‘You’ve sung about love in so much of your artistry…’ I say, ‘Though Koababa is a new sound, it’s still about love as well. Does it have an auto-biographical element to it? Is love something you believe in?’

‘As much as we are storytellers and create stories’ he says, ‘you can’t write about love if you’re not really a lover. I think people who have been involved with me know that ‘this guy is a lover!’, so some of the songs I write are my real stories about love. At one point, everyone has been in love with someone who they are afraid to tell their feelings to. So this song is just about that man’.

In person, Morena Sway is prone to sly smiles as he seems to reminisce over a fond memory, and then in other instances, his soft-spokenness gives way to an elder’s sense of wisdom.

‘In my life there was this one lady’ he says, smiling, ‘I was young, I was still a boy, and she was older than me. But I LOVED this lady, bruh! Badly! So just having to sit in the studio and think about this ‘love’ journey of my life, it made me write about that. Maybe there are people going through the same thing. I thought, let me just write something that could make a woman feel special and loved, make her feel admired from a distance. So I wrote a song about that’.

It’s easy to see how even with the new musical direction, he still has a clear sense of who he is as an artist. Though Amapiano influenced, Koababa shares the same DNA as his hit Sematsatsa, and his Lerato album in showing reverence to women. I grow curious and ask him why he decided to go down the new musical direction at all.

‘Having to be in this industry for as long as I have I came to a point where I decided to give people what they want’ he tells me, ‘It’s important to be relevant and not lock yourself in one specific sound…so I decided to fuse my core Afro-Beats sound with Mapiano. People want to have  Morena Sway on their playlists when they listen to Amapiano. But it’s not just Amapiano…there’s a lot of sounds coming. I don’t want to bottle myself in one sound, I just want to give people music’.

‘Are you scared at all that taking on a new musical direction will make you lose some fans?’ I ask him.

‘No, because people will still be getting Sesotho Afrobeats’ he says, ‘but I am also now bringing on people who like dance music, so I am getting a bigger crowd. It’s the beginning of good things’.

He smiles again with assurance, assurance in his music, assurance being at a point where his audience is about to grow. But throughout his journey, it wasn’t always ‘good’. Like any star, he has overcome various tribulations that now lend this moment in his career this sense of arrival. Just at the moment when his career was taking off, Morena Sway had to start over by going back to school.

‘I had originally left school to persue music’ he tells me, ‘and the plan showed me that it could work because of the success of the ‘I Swear’ song I did with DJ Finzo. But then my mom called me one day to say, ‘hela abuti’, come home and finish school’. For most people it would have been difficult….you’re on top of the charts, performing on TV, people are talking about you on every corner, and now you have to leave that life and go back to where you started from. But because I loved my mom so much it was easy to make that decision. She was the better part of me’.

When she passed away his world was torn asunder. It wasn’t long after her passing, during the difficult time that the world was dealing with the Covid pandemic, that he found himself homeless in the streets of Ficksburg.

‘That was one of the most difficult times in my life’ he says, ‘when she passed on…she was married in South Africa so it means I had step-family that side…because it was Covid she wasn’t able to be buried in Lesotho. She was buried in Pretoria. Then I had problems with my step dad and had to come back home to Ficksburg. When I got home that’s when I found out that my home was sold. Everything was sold.’

‘I just needed a place to lay my head. To heal. To find myself again. Luckily I had a car at that time and I would sleep in it. I couldn’t go back to Lesotho because of Covid, borders were closed. So I found myself wandering the streets of Ficksburg for four months. I would park my car in the garage and sleep, and find a way each day to have even just fifty rand to buy bread. That moment taught me how unpredictable life is. You can find yourself in this higher place and in the next moment find yourself so low’.

The period affected his mental health as well.

‘I went through every kind of emotion’ he says, ‘I was really depressed. I remember this one time I even attempted to kill myself. I was like, people would just see this car parked there for a few days, and when they opened the car they would find a dead person. It’s almost impossible that I am still alive because of the things I tried to do.’

‘But God had other plans for my life’ he says, ‘I am a living testimony of second chances’.

‘What advice would you give to anyone, or any artist going through the same challenges?’ I ask him.

He smiles, ‘It won’t always be night. The sun always comes up, even though sometimes the night seems to be longer’.

And he has seen his share of never-ending nights. A while after this experience, he wrote a lengthy Facebook post titled, ‘How My Talent Became My Pain’, detailing his encounter with a Deputy Minister who also runs an entertainment company, and how subsequently, the dissolution of that partnership led him to be blacklisted in the entertainment industry. He met Mr. Mokherane Tsatsanyane through close friends, and then later, had an appointment with him. After their meeting, he thought he had met the person who would finally help him launch his career and turn his life around. Mr. Mokherane offered accommodation until he could get back up on his feet.

It was here where, finding hope through music, he searched his own archives of material and came across a song called ‘Sematsatsa’, a song recorded in 2017. He uploaded the song on a Lesotho digital platform named MusicBox and to his surprise, it didn’t take long before the song started creating a buzz.

However, once he was able to re-record the song and place it on the right streaming platforms, ensuring that his name, and the song, entered the public consciousness, trouble started brewing.

‘When I pitched the song, everyone liked the song’ he tells me, ‘but then everyone wanted to own the song, and they didn’t even know where the song came from. People would go, ‘I wrote Sematsatsa, I wrote Sematsatsa!’…..Morena Sway won’t go anywhere above Sematsatsa’.

The meteoric rise of the song concided with stories about Deputy Minister Mokherane; how he would take advantage of artists. Though Morena Sway didn’t pay the stories any mind initially, suddenly, he found that opportunities started disappearing. Anyone trying to help him was discouraged, and Mr. Mokherane claimed that he was the only one who knew what was best for him. Morena Sway would find himself performing in political campaigns only to return home with an empty stomach.

One day, when he finally decided to accept one of the many offers that were put on his plate as the result of the success of the song, he faced ‘life-threatening’ statements from the Deputy Minister, detailing how he would send him back to South Africa to suffer.

Morena Sway wrote on Facebook that, ‘what once felt like a dream come true became my worst nightmare’.

All the bookings that he had lined up to support himself and his siblings subsequently vanished. He started receiving calls from promoters cancelling bookings, but then when pressed, revealed that they cancelled the bookings because they were threatened. Throughout 2024, he had no bookings, and everyone told him that it was as a result of the threats they received.

I ask him if this period affected his creativity.

‘Of course’ he says, ‘I’m human. I’d be in the studio, unable to write anything, because my mind was constantly on that situation. I feel like that experience should have broken me, but because I had by then been through much worse, it found me strong and resilient. I am grateful that I passed that phase of my life because now I am on the next phase of my life’.

And the next phase comes with Koababa, a fresh, new sound ready for the December summer when festivity and dancing take hold.

‘This is my opening of a new chapter’ he tells me, ‘This is me starting afresh’.

I ask him about any collaborations in his new music.

‘There are big collaborations coming!’ he says, smiling, ‘The collaborations that we are putting together….they are big artists who will help me shape my career, I believe. There’s just a lot of good energy around me at this point.’

As much as he is on the verge of a carefully drawn plan to stardom, I ask him if ‘legacy’ is something that he thinks about at all. What would he want someone to take away from the Morena Sway story?

He is silent for a while, thinking the question through.

‘As much as we do music so that other people can dance, I want to be remembered as having been true to the music’ he says, ‘That’s why I always try by all means to go on stage with a live band. I want to give people memories. I want it to be so that when we are all old, we should be able to say to our children, ‘If you want to listen to real music, go and listen to Morena Sway.’ In the way we listen to the legend Ntate Ts’epo Tshola. I want to be in that line. A lot of artists now are miming or lip syncing, but you can’t give people the same experience as they have when listening to the music in their car. Because the tickets they buy to see you perform are expensive! I want to be known for giving people something different, for being musical, for being original, and for connecting people’s hearts with real music’.