In May last year, Prime Minister Sam Matekane’s government made a move that reverberated across Lesotho and beyond. It declared certain Famo music groups, including Terene and Seakhi, unlawful organisations.
The reasoning was as bold as it was reductive. Famo music, they claimed, was the spark igniting Lesotho’s epidemic of violence. Ban the music, silence the accordion, and peace would follow.
It was a decision that grabbed headlines, stirred cheers from some, and raised eyebrows from others. To many, it felt like a page torn from an authoritarian script, banning music in the 21st century to curb murder.
I, like others, warned then that this was a distraction, a convenient scapegoat to avoid confronting a far uglier truth: Lesotho is a violent nation, not because of Famo music, but because of us. The music does not create our violence; it mirrors it.
Now, over a year later, the evidence is undeniable, and it is deafening. According to the Post newspaper, Justice Minister Richard Ramoeletsi, speaking before the Senate this week, said Lesotho recorded 747 murders between April 2023 and March 2024. That is 62 murders every month. Two every day.
In December alone, 93 lives were extinguished, nearly three per day during a season meant for unity and reflection. Where is the proof that banning Famo music stanched this bloodshed? Where are the numbers showing fewer graves, fewer widows, fewer orphans?
There are none. Because the enemy was never the music. It’s us.
Lesotho’s violence is not a byproduct of catchy accordion riffs or provocative lyrics. Famo music turned violent because we did. It is a mirror held up to a society that has normalised brutality, where life is cheap, and outrage is fleeting. To blame a genre of music is to ignore the deeper rot: a culture that has lost its reverence for human dignity.
The soldiers and police we deploy to “restore peace” are not outsiders. They are us, our brothers, sisters, cousins, neighbours. They come from the same villages, the same broken systems, the same anger that fuels the violence they are meant to quell.
So when they storm into villages under the pretext of “gun searches,” leaving bodies in their wake, we clutch our pearls and cry, “Human rights violations!” But what are they doing, really, if not reflecting the society that raised them?
This is who we are. A nation where murder is routine, where a killing barely makes the evening news unless it is particularly gruesome. A society where we mourn today and forget tomorrow. We are not violent because of Famo music. We are violent because it is in our bones, and until we admit that, we will keep pointing fingers while the body count rises.
Last year, I watched Prime Minister Sam Matekane address soldiers returning from a peacekeeping mission in Mozambique, only to redeploy them to Lesotho’s own war-torn streets. “The nation is overwhelmed by killings,” he declared. “Do everything to bring peace.”
It was the kind of tough talk that makes for good optics, strong, commanding, presidential. The crowd roared. The nation nodded. But within weeks, the same soldiers were implicated in torture and killings. Suddenly, the cheers turned to wails. Families buried loved ones, not at the hands of Famo gangs, but at the hands of those sent to “protect” them.
The lesson was stark: you cannot fight violence with more violence. You cannot heal a wound by slashing it deeper. Matekane, like too many leaders before him, fell into the trap of believing that toughness is leadership. But toughness without introspection is just posturing. It is a performance that leaves more blood on the ground.
Real leadership would have asked harder questions: Why are we so angry? Why do we kill each other at rates that rival nations in open conflict? Why, in a country of just over two million people, do we bury 747 souls in a single year? These are not questions answered by banning music or deploying troops. They demand a reckoning, a collective look in the mirror that we have avoided for far too long.
The Danger of Scapegoats
The ban on Famo music was not just ineffective; it was reckless. It trampled on freedom of expression, a cornerstone of any democracy, and Red flags were raised when users expressed concerns about the ban violating human rights.
But beyond the legal and ethical concerns, the ban was a distraction, a shiny object to divert attention from the real culprits: poverty, unemployment, broken families, failing schools, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness that festers into rage.
Lesotho’s violence is not a mystery. It is the predictable outcome of systemic failures. Over 40 percent of Basotho live below the poverty line, scraping by on less than $1.90 a day. Youth unemployment hovers around 30 percent, leaving a generation with little to lose. Schools are underfunded, healthcare is patchy, and opportunities for upward mobility are scarce. In this crucible of despair, violence is not an anomaly; it is an inevitability.
Banning Famo music does not fix poverty. It does not create jobs or rebuild schools. It does not mend the fractured social fabric that leaves young men turning to gangs for identity and purpose. It is a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, and we are bleeding out.
Lesotho loves a scapegoat. We blame Famo music today, just as we have blamed taverns, late-night gatherings, or “loose morals” in the past. Tomorrow, it will be something else—social media, perhaps, or a new genre of music. We will demand bans, arrests, crackdowns. We will cheer when soldiers march in, only to weep when they turn their guns on us.
But scapegoats do not stop bullets. They do not heal trauma. They do not address the root causes that make violence our default response. What we need is not another ban but a mirror, one that forces us to see ourselves clearly.
We must confront our culture of cruelty, our obsession with dominance, our indifference to the sanctity of life. We must ask why we resolve disputes with knives instead of words, why we glorify vengeance over forgiveness, why we accept murder as just another Tuesday. These are not questions for politicians alone, they are for every Mosotho, from the highlands to the lowlands, from the shepherd to the senator.
The path forward is neither easy nor glamorous. It requires investment in education and jobs, mental health support, and community programs that give young people purpose. It demands accountability for those who wield power, whether gang leaders, rogue soldiers, or complicit officials. It calls for a cultural shift, one that values life over pride, dialogue over destruction.
But above all, it begins with us. We must stop outsourcing blame and start owning our role in this crisis. Every time we shrug off a murder as “just how things are,” we perpetuate it. Every time we celebrate vengeance or idolise “toughness,” we sow the seeds of the next killing.
Famo music is not our enemy. It is our soundtrack, a raw, unfiltered reflection of who we are. Ban it, and it will reemerge under a new name, with new lyrics, telling the same story. Because the story is not about the music. It is about a nation that refuses to heal.
Until we face that truth, honestly, painfully, collectively, we will keep digging graves. And the music will play on, not as the cause of our violence, but as the elegy for a nation that could have been.
Lesotho activist and journalist who is the Chairperson of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Lesotho. He is an International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) alumnus.
Boloetse is driven by the need to protect and promote the rights of others, especially the marginalized segment of society. He rose to prominence as an activist in 2018 when he wrote to Lesotho communications Authority (LCA) asking it to order Econet Telecom Lesotho (ETL) and Vodacom Lesotho (VCL) to stop charging expensive out-of-bundle rates for data when customers’ data bundles get depleted.
