No local artist, dead or alive, has ever achieved African fame like Shumba Ratshega. Born Moses Molapela 35 years ago, and just like the biblical Moses, he took Botswana traditional music to the Promised Land and jammed it to new African markets that could not speak a word of Setswana. And they loved it.
The Shumba has roared throughout Africa. From the humid coastal city of Tanzania's Dar es Salam to Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, to the lakeside beach bars of Lake Malawi, from Nkhata Bay to Monkey Bay, to the dark drinking joints of Burundi’s Bujumbura, to the clean streets of Kigali, Rwanda, to the beautiful and truly African city of Kampala, Uganda, to the Kenyan metropolis of Nairobi, to the white sandy beaches of Mombasa, to the rolling tropical highlights of DRC. Inside the long distance buses, from Lusaka’s famed Intercity Busrank, where drivers behave like they are on some extreme sports, passengers are serenaded with Shumba’s DVD. Since early 2010, they have jammed to Shumba’s songs in bars and various drinking holes selling typically warm beers throughout east, central and southern Africa.
