Back in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, before Thato Kavinja was Koolkat Motyiko, he was bored and so started fooling around in front of his computer.
He was at Mmopane, a small village on the outskirts of Gaborone and missing his home village, over 1,000km away. His last visit to Seronga had been in 2007 when he was only 11 years old.
Throughout his teen years, his family lived around the Okavango Delta from Xaxaba, Entswi to Maun. But at the time of the pandemic, he was trying to eke a living in the big capital city.
A quiet, reserved boy from the Okavango Delta, city life was hard for the young Kavinja. So, one day while he was at ease passing time, he loudly reminisced about the happy days of Seronga playground when he was a kid.
“I just recorded myself singing on some beat from the Internet,” recalls Kavinja in an interview.
Little did he know that through that makeshift recording of nostalgia would be the birth of his musical career, let alone a classic song, which got to be called Ko Seronga. He sang about his childhood games that no child in the Southern part knew about.
He reminisced about the playground with his homeboy ‘Mompati’ and how they used to piggy-back their little cousins ‘Bonu’ and ‘Duda’ at Seronga ‘re tyika nkhorongo’. But he thought he was still playing when he sang all that.
Kavinja was at the time staying with a musician called Sheheya from Gantsi, who sings Gospel and Namastap. Sheheya listened to Kavinja’s little playful recording and added his own additional verse into it before exporting and sharing it on social media. And that is how the little recording became a trending song. Many people started singing along without even knowing the artist. As the legend of the song quickly became bigger than the man, Kavinja had to come up and claim the song.
After redoing the song with additional vocals from Myeyes, a family friend musician, he decided to ‘officially’ release the song. “I created the ‘Koolkat Motyiko’ page on Facebook on March 30, 2021, so that I can market the new song, which we had planned to release on April 26, 2021,” said Kavinja.
‘Koolkat’ has been his teenage stage name and he attached ‘Motyiko’ to it in 2021.
“I used to use the word a lot and Gabs people called me that. It’s a verb used in the Okavango to mean different things like to eat, fight, dance, leave, drive, or swim,” he explained.
Indeed ‘Tyika’ is said many times in the song. After the official release of ‘Ko Seronga’, Koolkat Motyiko realised that the song was already ahead of him in his own musical journey.
He had to play catch up as the song had become a national hit, receiving a lot of local radio station airplay.
The bookings quickly came in, interviews and musician life. Within two months of the song’s release, he had to quit his job at Absa Bank Call Centre to focus on the music. “I bought a big speaker and went home to Maun to sell my CDs. I used to sit by Shoppers in Maun selling CDs, and T-shirts,” he said. His T-shirts business partner Fatos then invited him to join their newly established band called The What Band. The group had several Maun-based artists including producer and drummer, Mike Rosen, Prince B (of Pwanda fame) Ms Gee, Helen, Dredd-X, Zowie, and Rita Christopher.
With over a year since the release of Ko Seronga, Koolkat Motyiko finally planned a trip back to Seronga. He was already famous in the village even though it had been over a decade since he had set foot there. He was widely known as ‘Mr Seronga’ because of his biggest hit.
His Seronga homecoming coincided with the Nkashi Classic race on May 28, 2022. But due to the Mohembo ferry delays (before the opening of the iconic Okavango River Bridge at Mohembo), Koolkat Motyiko and his entourage failed to make it in time for the Nkashi Classic race. He was, however, in time for his first-ever gig at Seronga which was at Marks Bar west of the village.
That night the low-lit bar was packed as the homeboys and girls were happily dancing to the music of (and by) one of their own. The following day, he visited the Winela Boat Station for some pictures of Seronga before going back to Maun.
And it was that morning at the boat station where he met producers of Nkashi: Race for the Okavango, Sarah Joseph, Dustin Sylvia and yours truly. We were looking for local music for our film that we were shooting in Seronga, so he gave us his last CD of the album Seronga 1 that he was carrying. And that was how Koolkat Motyiko began to work on the film score.
Koolkat Motyiko worked with talented producer Mike Rosen to produce six tracks for the film with some vocals from Ms Gee and Prince B. And Nkashi producers later brought the multi-talented NEWF Compose Yourself Lab to do an additional two tracks. NEWF Compose Yourself Lab is a collective of musicians from Africa on a mission to diversify the soundscapes of African wildlife documentaries. They, together with Koolkat Motyiko and Rosen, worked on two tracks for the film. Koolkat Motyiko later joined the NEWF composers at the National Geographic Society’s Storytellers’ Summit in Washington DC.
When the Nkashi: Race for the Okavango premiered in Maun, Koolkat Motyiko performed with the band some of the music they made for the film.
He also performed at the Gaborone premiere in front of President Mokgweetsi Masisi and First Lady Neo Masisi as well as Chief Executive Officers of National Geographic Society and De Beers Group, Jill Tiefenthaler and Al Cook, respectively. But he says the best moment was when he finally performed in front of the people of Okavango during the Nkashi Road Show.
On Independence Day eve this year, Koolkat Motyiko was in Wyoming, US, at the Jackson Wild Summit’s Media Awards, which are considered the highest bar of achievement in natural history filmmaking and colloquially called, “the nature equivalent of the Oscars”. Nkashi: Race for the Okavango was a finalist in the Global Voices category and went on to win the Original Music Score.
It was the biggest moment seeing a young composer from a remote village north of Botswana step up on the world stage to receive an award against the legends including the iconic German composer, Hans Zimmer.
True to his cool character, Koolkat Motyiko has not let beating Zimmer cloud his vision of telling stories about home.
He is busy working on his next project, an EP with some of Okavango’s creatives including producer Propain, Prince B, Rertz Vribrant, Serwalo and Bishop.
The EP is aptly titled, ‘Se A Bitsa Bitsa’, which means, “my culture and tradition are calling”.
*Thalefang Charles is a Storytelling Manager at National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project and a National Geographic Explorer.
