Mokoto Festival grows in leaps and bounds

Mokoto wa Lesoso Cultural Festival held this past weekend in Shoshong attracted over 400 revellers.
This is a significant growth when one considers that they brought together only 200 people last year when they launched.
Mokoto Wa Lesoso was first started by a young group of Shoshong youth, under their social club dubbed, Makgobokane. The Makgobokane social club was formed as an organisation aimed at helping the underprivileged and giving back to the communities of the Shoshong village and its proximities.
To diversify on their mandate, the social club then looked back into their village, on what they can do to promote culture, bringing people together to embrace their culture as the Bangwato of Shoshong.

The idea of cultural preservation was then benchmarked from one of the biggest annual festivities in the Bakwena village, the Dithubaruba in Molepolole.
Chairman of the Makgobokane Social Club, Edwin Lesole told Vibe that they realised that as one of the much-loved dishes in the Bangwato area is the Mokoto, then started the Mokoto wa Lesoso in Shoshong.

Lesole noted that the event had attracted people from as far as Urban cities to celebrate this cultural event and were treated to the traditional mouth-watering dishes, such as bogobe jwa lerotse, seswaa, phane, morogo wa dinanwa amongst others.

The traditional brew, khadi was also served. From the music part, a local kwaito kwasa artist born and bred in Shoshong, Swagger Lady kept the guests hooked to her energetic kwasa moves with her six crew dancers, as well as the local choirs on the scene.

“This event helps us to raise funds and work with social workers and identify the needy around the area and see how we can assist them. We had previously decided to build a house for one beneficiary in Motlhabaneng, unfortunately the beneficiary then passed on, but we then completed the structure and hand over to the deceased’ child.”

Lesole lamented that finance remains a major challenge in hosting the event but because they do not want to let the Mokoto fest lovers down, he had to make sure that he makes it a success. “I had to spend about P20,000 from my pocket to make this event happen. I had to make sure that I find money to make the event a success.

We approached Barclays and Choppies amongst other stakeholders, Choppies only availed their Shoshong branch manager to be a speaker, but availed nothing in terms of money or food items,” he said.

When the Makgobokane association started it had about 500 members from the youth of Shoshong and evrery year members renew their membership by P100 and P10 as monthly subscriptions, and now those who renewed their membership had dropped in numbers. The social club then uses the membership subscriptions to find something that they can give back to the community.

According to Lesole, they had printed limit of 200 tickets and they were sold out, and people had to pay at the gate and the number even doubled to 400 and more. He added that the merchandise was also sold out, as compared to the previous year where a bulk of the merchandise did not sell.

To end the formalities of the day just before dusk, men were gathered at the kgotla to be served with the Mokoto. This meat is only served to men and is not to be eaten by women. As for the night crawlers, the event’s after party was moved to a farm outside the village to continue with the fun.