Few people know the best and worst of Botswana’s entertainment industry as well as Soares Katumbela ÔÇô who counts over 20 years as a music promoter, artist manager, jazz DJ, and radio presenter. The graying hair and beard tell a story of a man who has had many dances with angels and devils ÔÇô and survived to do this interview. He has had his fingers burnt so many times it’s a miracle he still has a full set of ten.
The incidents are many.
There was a time he took a celebrated South African artist and his equally fêted band to perform at the Orapa Beer Fest. The following day, which was a Sunday, the set was booked to play in Boatle.
After the Orapa show, the artist did a vanishing act and the rest of the crew had to travel down south without him. As a result of this offstage sideshow, the Boatle gig started way past the fixed time. Understandably, the fans were irate. When he went on stage, the artist sought to deflect the fans’ anger by shifting the blame for the chaos.
“He said people should blame the promoter,” Katumbela recalls. “That really pissed me off. I raised it with him afterwards. He knew beforehand about the arrangement and he had agreed to it. Everybody came back from Orapa on time, except him. When an artist goes on stage and says that a promoter is a fuckup…..” He leaves the sentence to trail off, as if to be carried away by this morning’s nippy wind.
Another time and another show, there was an artist who was so drunk he couldn’t say his own name just three hours before he was to go on stage.
“I took him home and pleaded with him to sleep for two hours to refresh before the show. He eventually played, but he didn’t give a good performance,” he recounts.
Makes one wonder how you guard against such potential financially catastrophic antics.
“That’s why you should always have a road manager to make sure that the artist is ready for performance. The road manager must be strict. He has to take care of the entire programme such as lodging, meals, and ensuring that the artist gets to the performance venue on time. [For that task] you need someone who doesn’t get carried away easily,” he explains.
Katumbela knows firsthand what it means to build something good, only to see it dissipate when you think nothing can go wrong. For that we go back to Francistown, his home town. It was here that he was an important part of a family outfit known as Ritzmar Sounds Pub and Garden that was founded in 1991. The way it came about was that after the closure of the town’s popular nightclub New Yorker, where Katumbela had been a resident jazz DJ for seven years, there was no entertainment in Francistown ÔÇô almost as if the place was under a curfew. He spotted a business opportunity and Ritzmar was born. It was a multi-faceted operation. His brother ran the restaurant. Their mother managed the supermarket. The sisters operated the beauty salon, and Katumbela took care of the beer garden.
“Ritzmar was successful. We hosted international artists like Sankomota, Errol Dyers, Paul Lungu, William Mthethwa, Steve Dyer. We also had some local artists such as Afro Sunshine, and Kgwanyape. We used to host a lot of bands from Zimbabwe. Ritzmar was a mixed bag. We had jazz as well as house music nights. That’s where people like DJ Fresh started. He was in Tirelo Setshaba and he would come to Ritzmar every weekend,” Katumbela recalls.
It was the place to be ÔÇô and it remained that way for five years.
“I was still young, and to me it was more of fun than business. In fact, that’s where I had the most fun in my life. We used to travel to Zimbabwe…, ride motorbikes,” he says.
Towards the end of 1995, the signs were getting clearer each day that Ritzmar was collapsing. The business faced financial problems, and a painful, yet inevitable, decision was taken to close down in 1996.
To get away from it all, Katumbela decided to relocate to Gaborone, where he has been involved in setting up no less than five clubs and pubs in the capital city as well as surrounding areas like Molepolole, Mochudi and Mmamashia. The common thread that runs throughout these joints is that his focus has always been to provide a decent meeting place for jazz lovers.
After many problems with landlords and conflicting approaches to business with past partners, a few years back he decided to take a breather from club management to concentrate on his promotions and event management company, Streethorn, through which he also manages artists.
It remained that way until a month back when he allowed himself to be persuaded by a business associate to be a partner in a new club venture ÔÇô a jazz club in Gaborone called Catch Jazz 22.
“Initially I had made up my mind that I will only run a club when I am in my own place, my own plot, under my own management because I am the only one who understands my concept of providing jazz. It’s not easy to explain the concept to other people. I know that in my own place, on my own plot I would excel,” he says.
He explains the change of heart to make a comeback on the urge to fill a gap for live performances, especially jazz shows. He always got people coming to him to complain that they had nowhere to go to listen to jazz.
“Jazz artists struggle to find venues,” he says. “That’s one of the factors that convinced me to come back.”
Katumbela’s affair with jazz goes back to his senior secondary school days when he was introduced to the music by a lifelong friend, Matsi Matenge, and thus made the transition from rock and reggae. At Matenge’s funeral a few years back, the family invited Katumbela to play jazz, and he maintains that there couldn’t have been any greater honour than to bid farewell to a special friend in that special manner.
Katumbela probably has one of the widest jazz collections around, with over 1 000 CDs featuring artists from all over the world including Brazil, Japan, and almost every part of Africa. In 2005, South Africa’s record label, Sheer Sounds, put out Katumbela’s own compilation CD that features six South African and eight Botswana artists.
Does he ever lose CDs?
“I do, hey,” he responds. “I lose them every week and it pains me a lot because I don’t write CDs as a matter of principle. I don’t have even one copied CD. Guys say ‘why not put it in a computer?’, but I don’t enjoy it when I play music from a computer. The other thing is that as a product of creative work, music shouldn’t be copied. I know a lot of DJs do that (write music on CDs), but it eventually catches up with them because when they release their own CDs, they also get copied. As a rule, I believe DJs shouldn’t copy music.”
Having been a promoter for so long, Katumbela has got to befriend some of the big names he helped bring to Botswana over the years. Among these he counts Steve Dyer, Oliver Mtukuzi (“a nice guy” ÔÇô apparently), Louis Mhlanga, and others who have died such as Moses Khumalo and Sipho Gumede. He retains very fond memories of Gumede, the celebrated South African jazz bassist.
“I once toured with him up to Maun. People loved Sipho because he was a humble musician, very dedicated and easy to work with. I was the first promoter to bring him to Botswana, and in the course of time I brought him here 12 times,” he says.
He recalls that four months before he died, Gumede made an unannounced visit to Gaborone, not to perform. He was in town for three days. Katumbela talks fondly of an afternoon barbecue the friends had at one jazz aficionado Thulani Manana’s house. It was the last time they saw Gumede.
Having managed Botswana’s rising jazz star Shanti Lo for four years, Katumbela disputes the view that artists are a difficult lot.
“I am enjoying every bit of it. We don’t have any issues, not even one. Our relationship is moving smoothly. He is professional, patient and focused. Perhaps the problem with other artists is that much as they want to have managers, they still want to manage other issues. That confuses the manager. But Shanti has allowed me to do everything for him. All he does is to concentrate on rehearsals, and composing music,” he says.
He identifies it as one major weakness of the local industry that most established artists choose not to have a manager who looks after the business side. They handle everything ÔÇô from booking recording studios, selling CDs, organising shows, negotiating payments, hiring sound equipment, to running after old debts.
“By the time they get on stage, they are out of breath and tired,” he says. “In the process they end up being paid almost nothing for their performances because they are desperate to perform, and it’s killing the performance industry.”
Katumbela has had many fights with government departments and corporate bodies over what he sees as disdain for local artists. In fact, he sees it as his new agenda to fight for recognition of local artists so that they are paid decent performance fees.
“People hate you because you want them to pay good money for artists. The same person who meets you in the street and tells you that an artist is good wants to get the artist for nothing. To them it’s not about quality, but the cheapest artist. I always ask them, ‘do you want a cheap artist or good quality for your event?’.”
Katumbela has hosted a Sunday jazz programme on Duma FM for the past two years and has steadily built a following. He is grateful that the programme keeps him on his toes, and challenges him to update his jazz collection.
