The Way Out Is Inward

How a Botswana artist turned grief into a homecoming

QUOTE – Lone Motsomi’s multidisciplinary performance ‘Kgololo’ – born in China, rooted in Gaborone – asks what it means to stop running from the past.

There is a word in Setswana that does double duty. Kgololo means liberation – the kind that cracks open a cage and lets light flood in. It is also the name of a man who is no longer alive: Lone Motsomi’s father.

When Motsomi steps onto the stage of Maitisong Theatre in Gaborone and inhabits that word; when she makes it breath and bone and sweat; she is not simply performing a piece of theatre. She is holding two truths in one palm: the liberation she has chased and the man she cannot bring back. The result is a work that refuses to tidy up grief into a neat arc, and that is precisely the point.

Kgololo: The Way Out Is Inward made its Botswana premiere on Sunday, 30 August 2026, before an audience that filled the intimate Maitisong with a stillness that arrives only when people recognise themselves in what they are watching. The work had already travelled far; its world premiere took place in China in 2025; but bringing it home to Gaborone was never going to be just another stop on a tour. It was, by every measure, a return to sacred ground.

The body as archive

Motsomi does not narrate her pain so much as let her body testify to it. In Kgololo, movement is the mother tongue – the first language we reach for when words fold under the weight of what they are asked to carry. Contemporary phrasing collides with traditional Botswana gesture; theatrical storytelling meets the raw physicality of someone working something out in real time, in front of you, without a net.

The through-line is deceptively simple: What if the way out of pain is not escape, but confrontation? It is the kind of question that sounds almost too obvious to be profound; until you realise how much of human life is spent doing everything but confronting the thing that aches. We pack it into boxes. We move cities. We smile through it. Motsomi, instead, walks straight into the fire and invites the audience to follow.

She draws on childhood pain, absence, resentment, spiritual questioning and the slow, unglamorous work of self-acceptance. Her thesis is that the body remembers what the mind would rather forget – that our histories are somatic, etched into muscle and breath, and that freedom begins not with flight but with the courage to stay.

A name that carries weight

The title Kgololo is not metaphor. It is biography. In naming the work after her late father, Motsomi layers the personal and the linguistic until the two become inseparable. Liberation and loss share the same syllables. Every time the word is spoken – and in Setswana it is spoken with a kind of reverence that English cannot quite replicate – it summons both the freedom she seeks and the man whose absence set her searching.

This is not art that keeps a safe distance from its maker. It is art that is the maker – laid bare, unreconciled, alive with the tension of someone who has decided that the only honest posture is vulnerability.

An African collective, Not a solo act in spirit

Though the stage belongs to Motsomi alone, Kgololo is anything but a one-woman operation in spirit. The creative team reads like a roll call of Southern African talent at the top of its game, and their commitment to the project speaks volumes about what they saw in it.

Thabo Rametsi, the South African actor whose credits include Silverton Siege and Kalushi, and who is set to portray Hugh Masekela opposite Cynthia Erivo’s Miriam Makeba in Bill Condon’s forthcoming The Road Home – signed on as executive producer. His reasoning was unequivocal: “This performance piece is breathtaking. The world needs to see it, needs to see young African artists coming together to immortalise our story on a grand scale. Lone is a generational talent.”

Beside him, Donald Molosi – the Motswana actor, writer and filmmaker whose solo theatre work paved his own path to Broadway – brought both experience and conviction. Molosi knows from hard-won experience what a single body on a stage can do: “Solo theatre created my Broadway success for fifteen years, and solo theatre again will change our Botswana theatre history this Sunday.” He executive-produced alongside Rametsi because, he said, “Lone’s work is masterful and important. It needs to be seen. Batswana need to see it before it returns to China.”

Noxolo Dlamini; whose screen and stage résumé spans Sarafina!, Jiva!, Silverton Siege and G20 ; serves as producer, and her admiration for Motsomi is palpable. “One of the biggest reasons I fell in love with Lone was how intentional she’s always been about her healing journey,” Dlamini said. “She truly embodies looking inward in order to find her way out. As tough as confronting traumas may be, she never runs away from the work.” MotherK Masire, the Botswana creative producer who worked on 2064 alongside Rametsi and Molosi, returns as producer, while Mpho Sebina coordinates marketing. Director Tefo Paya; whose own solo work Morwa has helped shape Botswana’s contemporary theatre; steers the production with a steady hand and an unmistakable local sensibility.

This is not a pick-up team assembled for a single outing. These are artists with shared histories, overlapping convictions and a collective refusal to let African stories be told by anyone but Africans – on African terms.

The Road From China to Maitisong

There is a particular kind of poetry in a work about homecoming that had to leave home before it could return. Kgololo premiered in China in 2025 – a fact that sits with its own complexity. Sometimes the world validates what the neighbourhood has not yet had the chance to see, and the journey outward becomes the condition for the journey back.

Motsomi’s own path mirrors this. She spent thirteen years with Mophato Dance Theatre, performed in Pula! The Musical on Broadway, and appeared on screen in The Woman King opposite Viola Davis, as well as in Shaka iLembe, G20 and Blood & Water. Those international credits are not footnotes; they are the muscles she built so that she could carry Kgololo home without dropping it.

What we inherit, What we carry, What we release

The questions that anchor Kgololo ripple well beyond one artist’s story: What do we inherit? What do we carry? What must we release? And how do we become free without abandoning where we come from?

These are not abstract philosophical musings. In a country like Botswana – where tradition and modernity negotiate daily, where the personal and the communal are woven tighter than any Western individualism can easily parse – they are live wires. Motsomi places her own memory within a contemporary performance framework and, in doing so, makes private grief a shared reckoning. The individual experience becomes a mirror for collective memory, and the theatre becomes the unlikely town square where the unspeakable is finally spoken – not in words, but in the language the body uses when it has run out of words.

A homecoming that was more than a premiere

When the lights came up at Maitisong, the Kgololo team described the reception as a “formidable welcome home” – a phrase that carries more weight than mere press-release gratitude. For a production built on the premise that liberation requires looking inward, there was something powerfully cyclical about bringing the work back to the soil that grew the artist. The Botswana audience did not merely attend; they received the work with what the team called “openness and generosity,” affirming the idea that art can create spaces where difficult personal experiences are not just endured but shared – collectively, bravely, without the pretence that everything is fine.

The team expressed deep gratitude to the audiences, artists, partners and supporters who made the homecoming possible. It was, they said, the beginning of the work’s next chapter as Kgololo continues its international journey.

The Way Out Is Inward

For Motsomi, the Botswana premiere was a return to home ground. For her collaborators, it was a moment to look a country in the eye and say: Thank you. And for everyone who sat in the dark at Maitisong and felt something shift – a recognition, a pang, the sudden urge to stop running – it was an invitation.

The way out is inward. It always was.

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