almost 4 years her

Rwanda’s Meddy: Music can cancel hatred

People who are good with computers are sometimes characterised as “uncool” or “not good with the ladies” - bad stereotypes, I know, before anyone thinks of complaining!

Rwanda’s Meddy is living proof those things aren’t true, singing some of Africa’s most popular love songs over the last few years, including hits like 2017’s Slowly and last year’s Dusuma with Kenya’s Otile Brown.

But a decade ago, when he moved to the US for university, music wasn’t in the plan.

"It was something I was doing because I loved it but I didn’t have any long-term goal. I was trying to do computer engineering."

Despite some success in his late teens in Rwanda, Meddy didn’t see music as a viable career.

"When I was growing up, even our own parents, they were not encouraging when it came to music. There was no hope in music. If you see your kid doing music it was more like, oh man, he is going to become like one of those guys."

Fortunately, that’s no longer the case.

"As the music was growing, the mindset was changing. Now they start to really value music, now they start see how it affects the youth, really made a positive impact. So people started to really embrace it.”

And it’s not just the success of artists like Meddy that helped alter that mindset.

The 31-year-old says the whole country has witnessed the healing power of music first-hand in the years following the 1994 genocide, when around 800,000 people were killed in just 100 days.

"After the genocide everybody was just frustrated… there was a lot of insecurities, fear. People were just not as comfortable as they were supposed to be. But with the music and the entertainment growing, it kind of brought everybody together. I realised how much music can do. Music can literally cancel racism, can literally cancel hatred.”

When Meddy released Ni Jyewe from his new base in the US in 2009, his first song in nearly two years, the “crazy feedback” helped persuade him that maybe there was a future in music after all.

It did mean the computer engineering had to take a back seat - but that turned out to be a very cool decision.

Read the breaking news here. : slotxo

over 2 years her

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