It was because of the music, we were able to find our identity
Our culture was lost within the intricacies of colonialism, nationalism and migration, but it was in the music that we was able to find the questions to our answers. It is in the music that some of us have been able to rediscover to who we really are.
Sometime in the 1940s, Elsada was a tailoring business that my Grandfather owned in Nairobi, Kenya. The photo here is myself as a child along with my Dad, visiting the shopfront for the only time in my life. My Dad tells me so many stories of my Grandfather being entrepreneurial, intellectual and wanting to be in control of his life. In search of new opportunities, he had travelled from Goa, Portuguese-India, into East Africa at a young age. Via Mozambique, he landed in Kenya, working in the wilderness, helping to build the legendary East-African railway
This spirit of going into the unknown but having trust in the process that you’re building something greater, is a key inspiration for me to start this project. Anybody who knows me, will tell you that I’ve committed so much of my life to music. There’s been so many times I’ve left like giving up, but I know this journey is contributing something deeper to our world.
I’ve invested so much of time and emotion into this journey, I cannot just give up. It’s my obligation. It’s time we created our own opportunities and stop waiting on others. We have the resources. I’m not yet sure where we’re going to in this journey, but I hope you join in. “Keep doing what you do, until you make them understand that that’s what you do”, Dizzee Rascal.