#Other countries : The manhunt is launched: main suspect, a figure of a gang from the small mountainous kingdom of southern Africa, Lesotho, torn apart for twenty years by a war between rival gangs of “famo”, a hip-hop local, which has already caused a hundred deaths.
South African police this week issued arrest warrants for five men in the case. Among them is Sarel Lehlanya Sello, who hails from Lesotho but is described as a “well-known” figure in the police service in the Johannesburg area.
More than 15% of the 2.2 million population of Lesotho, landlocked in the “rainbow nation” and economically dependent on its big neighbor, live in South Africa.
On the wanted poster, the wry-looking man wears a traditional Lesotho shepherd blanket: yellow and black, the distinctive colors of the members of the “Terene” gang. On his cap, the name which means “train” in the Sotho language, in reference to the great migrations to the South African mines in the 1970s, is visible.
>>> READ ALSO: South Africa: the 21 young people who died mysteriously in a bar would have been “asphyxiated”
Settlement of scores between rival gangs? Orderly murder? The police are stingy with comments, guaranteeing anonymity to anyone with information. Local authorities only specified that the suspects, wanted for 16 counts of murder and 7 attempts, are on the run “to a neighboring country”.
In Maseru, capital of Lesotho, it is difficult to untie the tongues on a gang war which, according to several local sources, has killed a hundred people over the past fifteen years. The “famo” has become almost clandestine, the representations are placed under strong police surveillance.
Money and jealousy
“It’s gotten out of control”, loose with AFP Morena Leraba, 37, a singer of “famo” of the new generation, who compares these rivalries to the gang war which marked the history of American rap in the 1990s.
The “famo” was born almost a century ago from the poems composed by black Lesotho labor during the long journeys to reach the South African diamond and gold mines.
>>> READ ALSO: Lesotho: diplomats expelled from South Africa for illegal sale of alcohol
“Nowadays, we would call it rap,” says Rataibane Ramainoane, founder of a local radio station, MoAfrika FM.
Recounting the languor of hundreds of kilometers of travel, the loneliness in the evening in the “shebeens” – clandestine bars under apartheid – or the harshness of work, these men gradually introduced instruments and the accordion became emblematic of a genre now considered “the soul of the country”.
“The famo is part of everyday life, in the street, taxi stations”, explains Morena Leraba.
White South African producers began to market recordings and by the end of apartheid some artists found success with records that sold thousands of copies.
What was until now a war of words on the model of modern rap “battles”, then becomes a commercial war.
“Some, jealous of those who sold better, began to eliminate them, literally,” says Rataibane Ramainoane. Radio stations accused of giving more airtime to one of the groups find themselves threatened: “It’s a miracle that I’m still alive,” says Ramainoane.
>>> READ ALSO: South Africa: rampant crime, murders still on the rise
After a spate of killings last year, Lesotho’s police minister tried to ban the wearing of traditional blankets associated with gangs, some of whose members are suspected of being involved in illegal gold mining in South Africa.
Their sulphurous reputation does not, however, prevent the party at the head of the ruling coalition in Lesotho from expressing a certain closeness.
The leader of the All Basotho Convention (ABC), Nkaku Kabi, recently praised the members of “Terene” for having recruited many supporters, ahead of the legislative elections scheduled in a month in the constitutional monarchy.
On tour in Europe, Morena Leraba now spends little time in Lesotho. Describing a system that recruits “little brothers, who will sing and kill” in turn, he distances himself from a logic of “endless revenge”.