This interview had initially been scheduled for Friday, but it was only possible yesterday. Eliane Umuhire, singer Mani Martin’s communications manager who facilitated our meet, had overlooked one simple fact in setting up the first appointment – the singer would be unavailable for the better part of the day (he had an exam at the Mount Kenya University, where he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Media and Mass Communication).

When I got back to Eliane the following day (yesterday), she was not very sure if (and what time) we would be meeting Martin. Owing to the lengthy power outage in most parts of the city, telecommunication was a bit tricky.

When she came to The New Times offices to pick me up, she said simply: "Let’s go and try to find him”.

We drove from Kimihurura where The New Times is located, to the singer’s residence in Nyamirambo.

It was mid-morning when we arrived and, getting into the house, were wearily welcomed by Mani Martin, clad in a black vest and flowery sports shorts. He was coming out of the bed room and, going by the looks on his face, it was obvious we had interrupted his sleep.

Most celebrities in Rwanda are averse to letting the media and journalists into their cribs, so I found it prudent to thank the singer for the invite. If anything, his house is a modest one, situated among a handful of others in a nice little gated community.

The house is neatly adorned with plaques and awards he had scooped in previous contests, Rwandan cultural artifacts, plus the most impressive –a hand-painted giant portrait of the singer in army camouflage hanging from one of the walls. He later tells me it was a donation from a fan in appreciation of the positive influence the singer’s music had on him.

"How is school, journalism school?”, I ask so that we can get that out of the way:

"This for me is just a platform to add some skills and, you know, getting to know some other stuff that I never knew before and who knows, probably one day I’ll do something in the media, although I’m not really planning for that.”

His decision to enroll for media studies was not accidental, he further intimates.

"When I was young my first dream was to become a big journalist. Music just found me, but the biggest dream that I had was to be a journalist. I even used to imitate voices of radio presenters from primary school but music just found me along the way and now I’m a musician.”

Getting into the music

It was at six years of age that Mani Martin first developed what he describes as "this crazy love for music”.

"I can’t say I was a singer or musician, but I would always dream of music, and I could memorize any song that I heard on radio, and I could sing the same songs at school.”

Then he started doing it for his classmates and teachers, a fact that would expose them to the youngster’s singing abilities.

"My school teacher was actually the first person to discover me as an artiste because we had this course unit called Art and Initiative or something like that and it was all about the arts. You could just choose whatever art form you wanted, and I remember for me it was always music,” he explains.

Martin used to sing those songs that he had memorized from the radio: "Back in the day it was only Radio Rwanda, but you can imagine that a song would play just once, and I could memorize it in my head.”

When he was nine years old, he started doing rather serious performances at school. Teachers started encouraging him to sing at school events and celebrations like the Day of the African Child.

By that time he was singing traditional songs by Cecile Kayirebwa almost exclusively and, indeed, today he regards Kayirebwa as one off his greatest inspirations. He explains:

"Because she was the most popular musician on the radio at that time. I just had a different feeling to her music compared to other musicians.”

At eleven years old, one of his teachers, the very one that used to encourage him to love music now started encouraging him to join the church. He joined the kids’ choir at his church, and immediately left an impression with his voice.

He left the choir after about two years to embark on his high school studies. He tried to join many other choirs thereafter, but was always denied a chance on account of his tender age. Instead, he decided to start singing alone, and it’s at that time that he crafted what you can call his first song.

"When I was nine years old, I just had an idea. I couldn’t call it a song but I had a lot of questions in my mind because that was 1997, three years after the genocide. We had friends – those kids with who we used to sing and play together but that we couldn’t see anymore. I had this question in my mind: Will we ever see these friends again? What really happened to them?

So after three years I was now asking whether they would ever come back and whether we would play and sing together again. I made a song out of this but which I never got to record. Instead I just sung it for other people and they liked it. That is what I can call my first song. It was called Bari he? Which means "Where are they?

Going professional

Unknown to many of the singer’s fans, many of who take Mani Martin’s musical roundedness and professionalism for granted, taking music professionally actually came much later for the artiste – in 2010.

"Before, when I sung in the church, I just took music as a passion and a part of me, but not really as a profession. But in 2006 I recorded my first song, a gospel song calledUrukumbuzi which became so popular in Rwanda. It was basically a song about the suffering that people went through around the world, but also a song about the hope that we will live a better life thereafter.”

Urukumbuzi is what you would call an accidental hit. The singer had met a pastor in Nyamirambo who was very impressed by his voice and his singing and his talent.

"I sung in his church and he was very impressed, and asked me to record a song. The funny thing is that the song that he liked is not the one that I recorded. He gave me a producer and I sung a lot of songs for the producer so that he could choose the best, and he chose Urukumbuzi.

He released the song in 2006 and it immediately became a big hit. Although a gospel song, everyone seemed to like and identify with it. It was a nice moment for the singer, but taking music at a professional level really came in 2010.

"The first thing I did was to think about myself. I tried to put myself together to see what I would do because I had no hope of continuing to university. I was trying to check myself to see what power I had in me, and I found that music was that power, and so decided to take it up as a career and as a profession. I could now embark on doing music without barriers, because back in the day when I sung in church I was just a gospel musician. I was doing it as a hobby and as something that I liked.”

Multi-lingual

Mani Martin knows Swahili, but does not speak it because "I don’t have people around me that speak it.”

Otherwise it’s one of the four languages you are likely to encounter in most of his songs:

"I like languages because I like to communicate with people. In my high school I did arts and languages because I had that passion to be a communicator. Kinyarwanda is the first, followed by English and French, then Swahili.”

Kesho Band

The singer’s professional set comes by way of the seven-member Kesho Band, which has James Muhinda on percussion and drums, Clement Iradukunda who plays acoustic and lead guitar, his brother Sam who plays base and also sings, just like his brother, Joshua who plays percussion and sings, while Robert plays the piano. Adam, the youngest member of the band is still in school.

"We play both traditional and modern instruments, which makes my music to be different but also unique.”

He started the band back in 2012, because he was "very tired of performing without letting my heart speak to people.”

Live singing Vs CD playback

"I can’t say that CD playback is bad, and I actually don’t have any problem with artistes doing this –I also sometimes do playback when it’s necessary. However, playback could never let my heart speak to people. Say you recorded a song in 2005, and then we are in 2010, you just bring the same CD and play it, make some gestures for the crowd, but your heart is not really with them.

I believe that for an artiste, singing is when you let your voice and your heart and your everything to speak to people, but playback is when you show yourself to people and let them listen to your CD.”