But that discomfort reveals a deeper misunderstanding: that African artists must be documentarians of their nationhood,  not authors of their myth. 

I reject that.  

I reject the pressure to flatten myself into a single, legible identity — just because I come from Botswana. My name is not an erasure. It is a resurrection. 

It is no different from what I see every weekend on football pitches across Botswana.  

There, you’ll find men who were never given a shot at professional football. But come Sunday, in their townships and  villages, on makeshift fields and bare patches of earth, they are legends. They rename themselves after the greats — not  just Ronaldo or Messi or Drogba, but South African giants like Doctor Khumalo, Jomo Sono and Benny McCarthy. This isn’t just mimicry. It’s ritual.  

It’s how the working-class Motswana lets himself live inside the dream, even if only for 90 minutes. Even if only through  a name. 

And this spirit of escapist embodiment is not limited to sport. It lives most vividly in the Maroko subculture — often  misread by foreigners as “hellbangers” or “rockers,” but far more profound than those borrowed terms suggest. 

Maroko is a homegrown Botswana movement.  

A metalhead aesthetic, yes — but more than that, it’s a way of surviving silence through spectacle. Maroko members don’t just dress like rockstars. They become them.  

They don leather, spikes, chains, boots — with more intention and drama than any runway show. And once the garments  are on, the performance begins.  

They might never take to the stage or record a single riff. But that’s not the point.  

Each individual is the band. The icon. The myth.  

And with that transformation comes a new name. Always a name. A chosen moniker — dark, fantastical, defiant. To the world, they might be anonymous.  

To one another, they are legends. 

Like me, the Maroko community understands that in Botswana, naming oneself is an act of rebellion, art, and survival all  at once. 

We do this because the space for formal dreams is nearly non-existent. 

There are no institutions to support us and the industries don’t fund us.  

So we turn ourselves into icons in the only way we can: through costume, community, and character.  Our art is not always on stage or in a gallery — sometimes it lives in the street, the soccer field, the Sunday rally, the backroom gathering, the parking lot pregame.  

And in these spaces, the names we choose are not fantasy.  

They are freedom. 

This is what I wish to tell those who critique my name — and by extension, my right to invent myself.  We are not diluting our culture.  

We are expanding it.  

We are finding ways to be whole in a country that has taught us to stay small.  

We are resisting through persona, through play, through the sacred absurdity of alter-egos. 

My name, Diablo Santana, is not Western. It is mine.  

It is not about erasing Botswana — it’s about allowing Botswana to contain more than just what is expected of it. 

Too often, African artists are expected to be pure mirrors of their nations — as if we don’t also live fractured, transnational, hybrid lives. As if we do not dream in soundtracks that were never composed here, but still speak to us more deeply than silence.  

As if we do not deserve to build mythologies of our own. 

But I do.  

And I will. 

I am Tswana.  

I am from Botswana.  

But I do not belong to the small box that category tries to fold me into. 

I am not here to perform national pride under someone else’s terms. 

I am not interested in being palatable to institutions that do not make room for contradiction. I am not bound to the name  my parents gave me – that name is theirs, part of their history. I carry it with honor, but I walk forward with the name I  choose – the name that sings the truth of who I am becoming. 

My name is my stage. My name is my arena. 

It is my right — not to erase where I come from, but to expand what it means to be from here. 

Artists outside of the continent are rarely burdened with these questions. 

They are allowed to play, to invent, to perform. 

But when you're from here, when you're a Motswana artist, you're expected to carry your entire nation on your back, to  represent your people with every breath, to never step outside the role assigned to you by birth. And if you do — if you name yourself something else, if you dress differently, if you refuse the script — they say you’re  trying to be someone you’re not. 

But I am not trying to be someone else. 

I am trying to be everything I am — and that includes the dreams I was told were too loud. 

My uncle tried to soar away from these same constraints through a single name. He called himself Santana, after his  favorite guitarist, and he wrote it into his school documents as though it had always belonged to him. It was bold. It was  sacred. It was a small act of resistance dressed as a signature. My grandmother was livid — thought it was foolish,  foreign, childish. But I understand now what he was trying to do. He was naming himself into the life he wanted, the  music he loved, the freedom he couldn’t otherwise touch.

After his passing, that name — Santana — became heavier, fuller. I took it on not just to honor him, but to finish the story  he began. To complete the persona he started writing. To live the version of self-invention that he could only sketch in  margins. In taking it, I felt something lock into place. A line drawn from his spirit to mine. A moniker that was always  meant to echo beyond one life. 

There’s a quiet power in how some African parents name their children after Western icons. It’s not mimicry — it’s belief. The name becomes a kind of blessing, a way of saying, you too can become something great. In that moment, the  icon represents the impossible made real — a hope that, despite the weight of environment and the fate it tries to assign, this child might still rise. 

It’s the same instinct that led my uncle to call himself Santana. Less about imitation, more about reaching — for freedom, for recognition, for something larger than what the land around us seemed willing to offer. 

I love my people. I love where I come from. 

But I will not let that love become a prison. 

I am not to be defined by national ideals or expectations. 

A rockstar defines himself. 

This is not performance. This is not rebellion. This is freedom. 

I am Diablo Santana. 

I am 100% yours — and 100% not.

The Brahman bull was chosen deliberately. In Botswana — a land  shaped by cattle — this animal is prized for its endurance and resilience.  It withstands the climate, resists harsh terrain, and thrives where others  falter. It is not only a marvel of adaptation, but a creature of deep cultural  significance for Southern African Bantu people — including the Tswana  and Jona. It is central in life’s defining ceremonies: offered during  marriages to bind families together, and slaughtered at funerals to  accompany the dead. In both joy and sorrow, the cow is the medium  through which we express communion, continuity, and closure. 

In pre-colonial times, the cow held a status far beyond sustenance. It was  not an animal to be consumed casually, nor one to be slaughtered for  mere appetite. Instead, it was a store of value — a living currency — kept within the corral as a symbol of power, wealth, and life itself. To  possess cattle was to possess time, lineage, and legacy. A man’s worth  was measured not in coin, but in the quiet power of the herd behind his  gate.

In those days, when the village required meat to feast, it was not the cow  that was sacrificed. Instead, hunters would be summoned — bowmen,  trackers, warriors — tasked with moving silently through bushveld and  thorn, seeking antelope, wildebeest, kudu. The cow was not touched. It  was preserved, reserved for the sacred: for ritual, for passage, for  moments when life and death met face to face. It was the animal of  ancestors, the animal of union and farewell — a spiritual vessel, not a  common meal. 

This historical reverence lingers still, folded deep within the image of the  animal in this painting. It is not merely a creature. It is a monument to  memory. A witness. A relic of pre-colonial logic, where value was held  in life, not just in death. 

The title Sacrificial God draws on a Setswana phrase: Modimo o nka e  metsi — "the wet-nosed god." In this, the cow becomes divine, not  through omnipotence, but through service, through sacrifice. It dies so  that others may live, and in death, it unites the spiritual and the earthly. 

In the image, the animal hovers between life and death, its body rendered  without limbs — a gesture toward its utter helplessness, its absolute  submission to fate. The paint bleeds downward in long, unrelenting drips  — black, red, and crimson — echoing tears, blood, and rain. These drips  are not decoration; they are grief made physical. They speak of anguish,  frustration, helplessness, and rage. They weep for what has been lost and  scream for what remains. The animal is a body undone, weeping not just  for itself, but for what it represents — the violence of being, the  inevitability of loss, the dignity in sacrifice. 

This is abstraction as lament. A violent, expressive configuration of pain.  The image writhes with subliminal form but refuses clean representation  — because grief itself cannot be neatly rendered. It distorts. It contorts. It  

dissolves boundaries. In this way, Pain Configuration stands as a  statement on the autonomy of the Black African painter. It resists being  boxed, explained, or domesticated. It is not an illustration. It is a rupture.  A wound. 

Pain Configuration: Sacrificial God / Study of a Bull 3 is a hymn of  submission and survival. A visual rite that echoes ancestral logic — of  sacrifice, kinship, reverence, and spirit. It does not seek to explain pain.  It marks it. Holds it. Bleeds with it. And in doing so, insists that there is  something sacred in carrying what we cannot escape.