Francistown Mourns Soares Katumbela
Thursday, May 11, 2017
Former drummer with Francistown’s 1970s music group, The Shades, Cynthia Bright passed her condolences to the Katumbela family. Bright, who was visibly saddened, explained that Katumbela and her were members of the Makgadikgadi Band.
The mother of renowned Francistown-based disc jockey, DJ Bunz lives at Area W, a stone throw from the Katumbela family compound, revealed that they were brought together by the love of jazz, and were members of the Francistown Jazz Club. “This is shocking news to me. Katumbela was a great man, a really good person, we played (music) together for a long time,” she said. “Since I have known him in the 1970s, he was dedicated to the music industry. He made music his career and he helped a lot of people that are musicians today. It is a huge loss to the jazz fraternity and to music in general.”
It is not uncommon in this part of the world for parents to actually punish their children when they show signs of depression associating it with issues of indiscipline, and as a result, the poor child will be lashed or given some kind of punishment. We have had many suicide cases in the country and sadly some of the cases included children and young adults. We need to start looking into issues of mental health with the seriousness it...