12 Nov 2025

 In Lephoi, directed and shot by Cyc Jouzy the late lyricist ATI stages one of his most visually charged metaphors. 

The video opens with him beside a children’s playground, dressed in a luminous orange suit that seems almost too bright for the scene. The air carries a strange stillness, heavy with foreboding. 

It is an ode to tragic love — one in which his lover not only sticks the knife but turns it. As the song progresses, the mood curdles. The scene cuts to ATI wandering through a bush clearing. 

He begins to undress as the song itself darkens, moving from innocence to foreboding. At its bleakest crescendo, he appears alone in a boat adrift on a lake the colour of aged sewage — a black expanse that seems ready to swallow him whole.

The sequence reads like an emotional map: from innocence to loss, from spectacle to solitude. The brightness of the orange suit evokes youth and optimism; the dark water, everything that follows when both have evaporated. For ATI, black is not merely a colour — it is a state of being. 

The black teardrop beneath his left eye, the gothic palette of his wardrobe, the deliberate dimness of his stage lighting — all point to an artist searching for meaning in the negative space of feeling.

Western culture often reads blackness as absence, but in ATI’s hands it becomes density — the fullness of emotion rather than its void. His fascination with black is psychological, spiritual, even historical. It carries the intimacy of confession, the ritual of mourning, and the possibility of rebirth. 

In Lephoi, that black lake becomes a metaphor for immersion in pain — but also for surrender to truth. To grasp the resonance of his symbolism, one must look deeper into Africa’s own relationship with black. In precolonial art, black was not the colour of death but of creation. 

The Egyptians called their fertile soil Kemet — the black earth from which life grew. Across West and Central Africa, sculptors darkened wooden figures in soot or oil to summon ancestral presence, while the Benin bronzes carried dark patinas that suggested divine authority. In these traditions, black was generative. 

It marked the threshold between the living and the spirit world, between the seen and unseen. ATI’s modern iconography reopens that vocabulary.  His darkness is not despair; it is cosmological. 

He returns to the ancient idea that creation begins in shadow.  The lake in Lephoi is therefore not an ending but a beginning — a return to the womb of the world. Yet his imagery also joins a larger conversation in the African diaspora, where black has long been both burden and banner. 

From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black is Beautiful movement, from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s erratic crowns to Kerry James Marshall’s matte-black portraits, artists have used the colour to reclaim dignity and visibility. 

Musicians from Nina Simone to Kanye West have turned it into sound — transforming sorrow into power.  ATI’s aesthetic aligns with that lineage, translating the global discourse on blackness into a distinctly Botswana register: solitary, spiritual, and intimate.

When he first adopted his gothic look, some dismissed it as imitation of Western subculture.  But look closer and it becomes a dialogue between emo theatrics and African ritual. 

In many Bantu mourning customs, black cloth, charcoal markings, and night vigils are acts of reverence, not rebellion. Darkness becomes a spiritual medium — a temporary residence for the soul in transition. 

ATI’s teardrop can be read in the same light: less fashion than scarification, a reminder that grief, once faced, can be sacred. That personal symbolism has national echoes. Botswana’s youthful population inhabits a paradox — political calm alongside quiet anxiety. Economic optimism meets emotional exhaustion. 

ATI gave that unease a vocabulary.  His darkness spoke for a generation confronting disillusionment with faith, love, and belonging. In making pain visible, he broke the polite silence that often surrounds it.

The final image of Lephoi lingers: ATI floating motionless in the black lake, neither sinking nor swimming. The light has receded, yet the scene feels peaceful, not tragic. 

The water holds him as if in suspension — a moment between dissolution and discovery. For centuries, black has been treated as absence — of light, of virtue, of hope. 

But in ATI’s art it becomes the opposite: the place where everything begins again. Darkness, for him, was never the enemy of illumination. It was its condition. Without it, nothing could be seen clearly. ENDS