Every September for more than a decade, something quietly remarkable has happened on the banks of Gaborone Dam. A stage goes up at the Bojanala Waterfront, international royalty of every genre flies in, and for one week Gaborone stops looking like a diamond capital and starts looking like a cultural one. Visitors cross the border from Zimbabwe and South Africa specifically for it. Air Botswana’s schedules fill up around it. Local designers, caterers, sound engineers, and craft vendors build entire micro-economies around it. And at the center of it, year after year, is one man who built the whole thing from nothing: Thapelo “Fish” Pabalinga.
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