Kijani at the 2nd Africa Scout Moot: 400 battle bots play soccer in Benoni
From 1–8 August 2026, Rovers from across the continent are descending on Arrowe Park in Benoni, Johannesburg for the 2nd Africa Scout Moot — and Kijani is coming with them. We're bringing 400 boards for two days of robotics on Sunday 2 and Monday 3 August: robot soccer as the main event, with the arena open for pickup battles in the spare time between matches.
Phezulu Nangaphezulu
The Moot's theme — Phezulu Nangaphezulu, "higher and higher" — is a fitting one for a project built around the idea that a full combat robot shouldn't cost more than a pair of boots. The event promises outdoor adventure, workshops, cultural exchange, and service projects for Rovers from Scout organisations across Africa, and for two days of it, robotics is part of that mix.
Kijani was designed for exactly this kind of setting: no soldering stations, no transmitter fleet to manage, no app
to install. Each board carries its own motor drivers, servo outputs, LiPo charging, and a WiFi access point serving a
browser-based control interface. A Rover connects a phone to the bot's network, opens http://10.10.10.10, and drives.
Why soccer?
Kijani was born as a battle bot platform, and battles are what we originally wanted to run at the Moot. The maths got in the way: we have one arena, and one arena can't feed 400 bots and a campsite full of Rovers. A soccer pitch, on the other hand, is anywhere you can mark two goals — and with the FIFA World Cup barely two weeks behind us, the timing writes itself. So the headline event is robot soccer: teams of Kijani bots, tank steering, and a ball that refuses to cooperate.
The arena still comes with us, though. Battles are what the platform can do, and in the spare time between soccer matches, Rovers are welcome to settle things in it the old-fashioned way.
What 400 boards gets you
A few hundred boards at a single event opens up formats we've never been able to run at this scale before:
The main event, running all of Sunday and Monday. Every pitch is just open ground and two goals, so we can run as many matches in parallel as there are teams to play them. Break a bot mid-match? Grab another board and get back on the field.
One arena, first come first served, open between matches. The same board that plays striker becomes a flipper or a spinner — the difference is what you bolt on. Battles are where Kijani started, and the arena is where spare time goes to die.
Because the entire robot is an open HTTP API, Rovers who've had enough of driving can write their own control pages in plain HTML and JavaScript, upload them to the bot's filesystem, and have the robot serve their UI. Anything that can make an HTTP request can drive a Kijani — a fact we fully expect participants to abuse in creative ways, on and off the pitch.
The Moot has a strong service-project component, and low-cost robotics kits that survive a weekend of soccer can seed robotics activities back home. A board that costs around R600 as a complete kit is a realistic thing for a contingent to carry back to their National Scout Organisation and build a programme around.
Why the Moot
Rover Moots gather 18-to-25-year-olds — precisely the group most likely to take a platform like this and run with it, whether that means mentoring younger Scouts, starting a local robot-soccer or combat league, or contributing firmware upstream. Everything about Kijani is open source, from the PCB to the C++/PlatformIO firmware to the stock web UI, so anything that gets built, broken, or improved in Benoni can flow straight back into the project.
If you're attending the Moot, find us on the pitch on Sunday or Monday — or in the arena between matches. If you're a contingent leader and want to plan a session around the boards, reach out via the GitHub repository before the event.
See you at Arrowe Park. Phezulu Nangaphezulu — higher and higher.