Growing up in a foreign country, and remembering the few weeks my family fled from our home in the villages of Congo.
Those days there was no way anyone could think of anything else but surviving to the next day, let alone changing the world. I was only a child but I know from the stories I heard and the look on the adults face that there was nothing else but survival that counted. No one cared about being clean or being naked.
The thing that motivates me to write songs, the thing that motivated Einstein and many more was love and passion, and there can be no love or passion without peace. It is the fuel of our lives.
I only write music when I have calmness and peace, peace allowed me to discover music in the first place, and I fell in love. Peace, bread love, and love breads passion and passion changes lives.
I was born in Rwanda in 1991. A month shy of my three year birthday, genocide erupted. My family which is Hutu with mixed Tutsi blood was facing the threat of being massacred. We were forced to flee to the Congo. We lived there till 1996 and war again broke out, Kabila along with the Rwandan and Ugandan army marched on Congo. And we were again forced to flee to Uganda before making our way to Rwanda. In 1999 my father got a scholarship to study in Nairobi Kenya.
I spent the best years of my childhood there. By the time we left in august 2006 I had lost my knowledge of the previous life and dint know what it means to be Hutu, Tutsi or Rwandan. Kenya was all I knew.
Once in Rwanda I was quickly forced to learn the truth and half truths and opinions about genocide and tribalism. In 2010 I went to live with my uncle in Goma ( DRCongo) where I was almost denied admission to a school because of the fear that I was Tutsi. Since the Rwandans were responsible for attacking Congo in 1996 and destroying villages and orchestrating many rebellions there is deep fear and mistrust of anyone who resembles a Tutsi! In 2011 I moved back to Nairobi! And I am currently pursuing music as a career. Click here to listen to the song 'We Run on Love' by Joel.