A leboko is a voice at one with identity
BONGI D D M RADIPATI* | Monday October 19, 2026 12:39
The poet reckons with its poetry, but leboko is poetry and more. The poet wrestles with its verse, rhythm, and line endings, but then without these, it couldn’t honestly be poetry as it is universally understood. Yet, the poet also brings to it a Botswana sensibility and then projects the passion, energy, and sultriness of their spoken words to the audience. But it still retains individuation as it allows every poet to break the mold of its content, presentation, and appreciation.
Imagine the following: It is a little while after daybreak one morning in the early 1850s in an area which more than 100 years later would be part of the new sovereign country called Botswana. Bakwena people are assembling and thus make small pockets of dust to rise at their Kolobeng kgotla.
An unidentified man steps forward into the center of the bare but proudly held amphitheater. He makes a slight bow. The audience returns the gesture. He carries no paper, no written notes, and no pen. In a commanding voice, he begins by belting out the names of Kgosi’s cattle, then the hills surrounding and protecting his village, and finally, the recent wars with the Boers and the amaNdebele. As he continues like this for over half an hour and catches his breath from time to time, an unidentified woman serenades the audience with her ululation as if she is part of this solo man’s orchestra. David Livingstone, the intrepid missionary who famously managed to convert only one Kgosi, Sechele l, to Christianity, is sitting quietly like everybody else and observant.
He has an open notebook, but his pen is still. It will be so until the end of the performance. Unbeknownst to Livingstone then, a leboko had just been performed before and in honor of Sechele I. Later, in England in the late 1850s, he would write and have published his 1857 seminal book, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. In it, among others, he praised Batswana public speakers of their memory, talent, and ability to hold audiences with the spoken word. From that moment, I want to suggest that the ephemeral performance of a leboko was captured in the permanence of ink and paper.
A leboko typically features sweeping and lyrical descriptions of its subjects, relationships, events, belongings, and communal activities as if all these were held together by a centripetal force. Every leboko is an alchemy that turns everyone of its performers, each of whom has incredible ability and each of whom appears to think of themselves as individuals first and a member of an artisanal collective second, into a compelling orator, actor and sage.
It also usually includes vivid scenes and metaphors that capture the wisdom of rearing leruo and ploughing masimo or the demands of being kgosi or the stress and unmet expectations of botshelo. Simultaneously, it is a powerful evocation of our world as it is or as it is desired. It wouldn’t be complete without the perceptible praise for the elites, or mirth for those who don’t take themselves seriously, or a veiled condemnation of abused power or hoarded resources. In all instances, a leboko does not sensationalize. Rather, it pays close attention. Because it identifies its subject matter and tailors its message to its audience, it starts and lands with wonderful precision, which can be fascinating, thought-provoking, entertaining, educative, and even inspiring. One of my earliest and most vivid memories of a leboko performed publicly just so happened to be on the day, sometime in the mid 1970s, that a VIP from the nation’s capital had visited my village. Then, as it is largely the case now, such a visit was a point of pride for us villagers since it was a rural but still glamorous carnival of sorts for our village. As youngsters, we were afflicted by the impatience and excitement of youth.
I recall us fidgeting about the uselessness of the pomp preceding the speech of the VIP for whose honor we were assembled at the main kgotla. Yet, our excitement and impatience were restrained by the occasional admonition of our dutiful primary school teachers who must have known of the value of leboko. Years later, I came to realize that each leboko at the VIP’s visit reeled with the simplicity of life that tessellated my village then. Even more years later and paying attention, I now note that every leboko and its performance everywhere holds together the exuberance, flattery, sincerity about life and power, and speechifying that are always a staple at public events in Botswana.
I have observed that leboko poets have booming or resonant voices. Sometimes, in addition to this, they have a physicality that allows them to have a presence.
Increasingly, women and younger poets are joining their male counterparts in this craft. This has succeeded in making a break with the craft’s historical self-identification as only manly. In a country that seeks to open opportunities to every citizen, these things matter. None of the poets has any specialized training in the craft. I am told that it is enough to harbor interest, have discipline to learn through practice, and exercise tenacity to hone one’s poetic abilities. Regrettably, even in the new millenium, the artisans of leboko still ply their craftsmanship in a time and place that appears to valorize yet simultaneously beleaguer them.
Without any formal training in oration, without any fancy introductions, without referring to any notes, and without a teleprompter to help them, certain things about a leboko are plain to everyone. The poet’s forte is their confidence, their chest is their archive, the spoken word is their erudition, the dust of the Botswana soil is their prepared stage, and the ululation is their standing ovation.
Clearly, a leboko starts with the stubbornness of a Motswana who isn’t discouraged by a market that won’t allow them to make a decent living from their craft. It continues with a poet who is convinced that their observation of our life, indeed our world of everyday, is their strength. It lands when we, the audience, learn to lean forward, then listen with a receptive ear, and harbor a corrective attitude.
As it has been since its origins, the content of each leboko clamors for the attention of those with power, wealth, influence, and position. The rest ought to listen and watch. Each leboko moves between oppositional realities: of ordinary people pleading for relief from what afflicts their community at that time, or the perils of a commercialized and consumerized life, or the vicissitudes of the weather. In the same beat, it will remind us that we are a nation that sometimes loses its way and at times finds it. It will not end without a gentle rebuke of its artisanal profession that despite its visible progressive strides continues to harbor an undercurrent of cruel irony.
The practice of leboko still remains as un-accommodating to livelihood as a drought-stricken field. Yet, each leboko is blessed with the fortitude of its poets continuing to turn over the stone of curiosity and observation and still finding and identifying more matters of life underneath it for their next leboko.
Therefore, a leboko is a marvelous and particular passion with a relevance that is self-evident. It is also historical and contemporary and empowering. In the end, it is a pursuit so vital to our identity and so captivating in its ordinariness that it beckons us all to find space for it in our own private lives.
*Radipati is a regular Mmegi contributor