Maitisong Festival has pulled out all the stops for its 21st birthday this year, staging internationally recognised acts such as Freshly Ground and Ba Cissoko as well as our very own local favourites, Scar, Vee, Eskimos, Franco and Chris Manto 7.

Not only will the festival, scheduled to begin in earnest on Tuesday next week offer a wide variety of music genres at the famous Old Naledi Outdoor Concert, but the organisers have highlighted that the event will also stage Mbongeni Ngema's popular musical, Sarafina.

The Multi-award winning South African theatre practitioner, Aldo Brincat who is also the Head of Department of Drama at Maru-a-Pula English Medium School noted that the Flagship Production which boasts of full cosmopolitan cast of singers, dancers and actors possesses a celebratory mood guaranteed to move the audience beyond what they thought they knew about Sarafina and her country.

The one hour 45 minutes Sarafina musical with an age restriction of 12 years will begin on Tuesday and run until the 30th of March.

Maitisong Festival Director, 31-year-old Gao Lemmenyane who ascended to the challenging seat after the departure of the then director, David Slater noted that preparations for the most popular festivity were well underway and the programme has been drawn and distributed.

"Although we are still faced with a couple of challenges such as not being able to convince the corporate world to support us, I can confidently reveal that this year's festival will offer patrons big shows with a totally different vibe. We have been able to pull about 23 local artists for the Old Naledi open-door festival."

An educationist with a background in drama, acting and theatre, Lemmenyane added that their undying love for the theatre is what pushed them to make sure the Maitisong Festival continues without failure.

"David Slater was a great man and his boots were particularly challenging to fill. However, the only greatest challenge is the observation we made that the festival has for the last three years shown a gradual decline in terms of popularity and in the interim we lost some of its oldest supporters. This culminated in us even losing the most coveted annual Sibongile Khumalo concert. I think the notion is that no one wants to support a dying horse."

However, Lemmenyane noted that all has not been lost as this year they have managed to bring to the annual festivity Ba Cissoko-the Guinea born but France-based international musician and his band who are billed to set the Maitisong stage on fire with their tunes.

Ba Cissoko has in the past performed to sold-out audiences throughout the world. His local performance, billed for March 31 will feature local King of Kwasa-Kwasa, Franco.

Lemmenyane said that in the next five years he hopes to turn the celebrations into a big national festival of the arts reaching as far away places as Francistown and beyond.

"We are extremely humbled that we were able to approach an accomplished playwright, Mbongeni Ngema who was very kind enough to grant us the right to stage his famous musical, Sarafina," Lemmenyana said.