Music in the face of odds

The villages of Botswana are full of music. Gospel music. Choral music. The singsong repetitive music of rote classroom learning.

But not opera, until now.

As a small girl in her Botswana village of Ramotswa, Tshenolo Segokgo learnt to sing in a church choir. She grew up and moved to the capital, Gabarone, for vocal lessons.

Then one day in 2004, her music teacher put on an opera CD. "It felt like it was angels singing," she recalls. Five years later, on a purple African night, operatic strains rise like evaporating heat from a white corrugated iron shed in the bush.

Clouds gather and darken. Thunder dissects the sky. Rain slashes down, beating on the shed's tin roof. Inside, the opera gets louder. It is just a rehearsal but Segokgo and the other singers of Botswana's first opera house, inside a converted garage, outperform the weather as they belt out the nation's first opera.

A grim tale of evil, betrayal and lust unfolds: The Okavango Macbeth, the story of a troop of baboons and its alpha female, Lady Macbeth, who stirs up trouble, plotting murder. Segokgo, as Lady Macbeth, struts the stage, her voice rising in sweet soprano but the words shriek death: "Kill him now!" she sings, urging her mate to kill the alpha male baboon.

When Segokgo began her singing lessons, it was clear she possessed talent and passion. But music, she figured, was no career. "I didn't think it was something serious. I was just singing for pleasure." Segokgo's big break came about two years ago, when a cultural official from the French embassy heard her perform at a function. A scholarship was arranged. She was sent to study at the conservatoire in Bourg-la-Reine, outside Paris for two years.

It was a big adjustment for a village girl. "I didn't speak French. It was a new environment. I had to adapt to the lifestyle of the French. But it changed my life."

The Okavango Macbeth was composed by Scottish composer Tom Cunningham and written by Alexander McCall Smith, the Zimbabwean-born Scotsman famous for the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of books. It is not easy to find the opera house, along a winding, bushy track outside Gabarone — a neat but bland city full of shopping malls and mirrored skyscrapers built for the bureaucracy.

The garage — part of a military recruiting station in the 1940s — was discovered by Segokgo's vocal teacher, David Slater, who showed it to his friend McCall Smith because it reminded him of Speedy Motors, the slightly rundown garage in the detective series.

McCall Smith loved the place. "He immediately said this should be an opera house," Slater recounted. An opera house? On a forgotten road outside Gabarone? If Slater had any doubts, McCall Smith's passion for opera swept him along. He and the novelist bought the garage, renovated it and dubbed it the No 1 Ladies' Opera House.

The opera director, Nicholas Ellenbogen of Cape Town, South Africa, and his son Luke made the sets — sawed and hammered out of tree trunks and branches and old bits of wood and wire — to resemble a jungle setting where a group of baboon researchers sit in a hide observing the baboons' behaviour.

Ellenbogen, well-known in South African theatre, founded Theatre for Africa, which set up dozens of small village theatre companies across Africa in the 1990s and performs around the world.

Studying opera in France, Segokgo performed in concerts and masterclasses across Europe. She would have stayed but after receiving her diploma in June, her sponsorship ran out. There was no money for the masters degree she had hoped for.

She returned to Botswana, frustrated but still nursing her dreams. She says: "I continue singing. And I'm giving some people singing lessons. So I am keeping that." Her voice trails off. Opera house or not, there is not much opera in Botswana.

The opera recently, the first to be performed in the 35-seat opera house, was like a spell of refreshing rain during a drought — wonderful. But it was a short season, over all too soon. "I would love to go and continue studying and help other people develop their careers. I feel as if I am missing opportunities. I have to go away to succeed," Segokgo says. But onstage she keeps her disappointments hidden.

As Lady Macbeth, she steals the show. Her eyes pop with evil as her voice soars beneath the corrugated iron roof. The audience laughs in the right places and at the end they applaud for a long time. The ovation nourishes her hope. She is waiting for her next break. "I want to go far," she says when the show is over. "I want to be a big singer overseas. That's what I want to do."

A juggling act at the No 1 Ladies' Opera House

Staging an opera in what was heretofore a shed posed many problems. Nicholas Ellenbogen had to bring the lights and other equipment with him from South Africa. He struggled to find sopranos. He had to feed the cast at each rehearsal and figure out how to get them back home each night because the opera house, outside town, lies beyond the reach of public transport. (He usually ended up driving some of them home, as far as 32 kilometres from the city.)

He also worried that female cast members might quit at the last minute, as often happens in Africa, he says, when husbands or boyfriends suddenly exert control. It is a cast of 16, half women.

But most of all he worried about the performances. The singing was marvellous. But the acting.

After one run-through, a few evenings before the premiere, a frowning Ellenbogen scribbled notes on all the problems he could see.

"I don't know how we're going to get everything done in time," he muttered to himself.

"Now come here, my loves," he said, gathering the cast members and gently critiquing them, one by one.

"The murder scene needs to be a lot more dramatic," he said. "And a lot louder. We need to work on that."