A Franco-Tanzanian production is crossing Southern Africa with movement, theatre and one provocative question: what would paradise look like if Africans stopped waiting for it and started imagining it?
GOSEGO MOTSUMI
Forget the postcard version of paradise. PEPONI is bringing something far more restless to Gaborone — a 60-minute dance-theatre experience that wants the audience to think, move and question what a better African future could actually look like.
On September 12, Maitisong Theatre becomes the latest stop on House of Wondar’s Southern African tour, as the Franco-Tanzanian production makes its Botswana debut for one night only.
And this is theatre with a question attached.
PARADISE, BUT MAKE IT AFRICAN
The title comes from the Swahili word peponi, meaning paradise, and from Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel Paradise. But rather than treating paradise as some faraway fantasy, PEPONI turns the idea inside out.
Its central provocation is deceptively simple: “Can we create our own paradise, here and now, on the African continent?”
That question drives a performance built from movement, theatre and audience participation. Spectators are not merely expected to sit quietly in the dark; the production creates space for performers and audiences to enter a conversation about belonging, possibility and the futures they imagine.
FROM DAR ES SALAAM TO MAITISONG
Directed and choreographed by Matthieu Nieto, with dramaturgy by Koleka Putuma, PEPONI is the debut stage production from House of Wondar.
Its September tour spans five countries — South Africa, Eswatini, Botswana, Mozambique and Tanzania with eight performances across six cities. Gaborone gets one.
That makes this more than another international cultural stop. It is a brief collision of Francophone and East African creative energy with Botswana’s own theatre-going crowd.
And accessibility is part of the production’s pitch. Supported by the Institut français of South Africa and Alliance Française de Gaborone, early-bird tickets cost P80, rising to P100, with the show open to audiences aged 10 and above.
For one Saturday night, paradise gets a stage. The question is what Gaborone will make of it.