From Ngagara to Ottawa and back home: Popo’s ride to stardom

I arrive at our rendezvous a bit late and find my source is not there. When I’m about to surrender, he ambles along with a heavy duffel bag on his back. He is a famous Rwandan artiste, Jacques Murigande alias Mighty Popo. Mighty Popo was born in Ngagara, Bujumbura in Burundi in a middle class neighborhood mostly habited by working class Rwandan refugees. “That was a vibrant community that produced many artists, thinkers and sports people, and many others in all spheres of life,” he tells me as soon as we sit down for the interview. He says that it’s his Ngagara upbringing that shaped his life to be what he is today. “At Ngagara, we had all types of people. It was a place that each one was free like a bird to choose their destiny.” During this time, Mighty Popo and his family were living as refugees in that volatile period of Rwanda history in the 80s and early 90s. When you meet Mighty Popo, the image of a hardscrabble life in countries, Rwanda and Burundi, that recent history has made shorthand in genocide and violence is hardly noticeable. He’s affable and of enormous charm and wit, and his voice speaks conviction about how his early upbringing from a loving family had profound influence on his life. Mighty Popo says that during his early life, he was too much into books and music. “By the time I was ten, I was playing guitar and harmonica. Music had been injected into my blood when I was that young,” he says with a chuckle. But it was not only music that was running in his veins during that tender age. At the age of 14, he was already reading the literature of Jean Paul Sartre and Karl Marx among others during his spare time. Did this kind of literature bring conflict between him and his history teacher? I ask him, curious to know because most teachers are adverse to pupils who appear more erudite than them. “Yes. I used to be kicked out of the History class because I could tell my teacher straight into his face to forget about teaching us Belgium history but African history. However, my French teacher was my ally because we shared the same level of thinking,” he says. But in ironic twist of fate, the history teacher became his best friend while the French teacher was disappointed in him because he didn’t major in literature, an area the French teacher wanted him to. Journey to music world After his school, Mighty Popo relocated to Canada on an asylum visa together with his elder sister. During his first week in Ottawa, he attended a four-day musical festival and a long-bearded white man with a guitar came to change his life. “There he was among the spectators holding a guitar. I asked him if I could play his guitar and he asked me if I was a musician, and I told him I could play guitar and harmonica. He told me he had been looking for a harmonica player and invited me for an interview.” He passed the interview and the two of them started playing in the club after signing a six-month contract with the owner on account of his talent. That marked the start of blossoming music career. Other bands could hire him and he says that this is where he met the crème de la crème of Canadian musicians. In the meantime, he used his savings to enroll into a college where he studied Precision Electronics Military Standard and after graduation was employed in a company where he would earn $15 per hour plus overtime. However, he quit the job when he realised that the company he worked for was involved in the Gulf War. Mighty Popo says that after this, he became like a free bird who studied anything he had passion for, like English, journalism and political science not to get a degree but to discover other hidden treasures of life as far as education was concerned. However, in 1994 he went full blast into music and this made him tour different countries in Europe as well as the United States. It was during this time that he got fresh insights into different genres of music. As Mighty Popo’s star rose, the passion for his country, Rwanda, also grew and he got a chance to visit in 1998 when he was called to perform during FESPAD musical festival where he not only visited his country for the first time but also had a chance to meet his grandmother whom the family had left behind when they fled to Burundi. “Visiting my country of birth helped me close one chapter of my life and open another one where I abandoned my orientation towards European music and came to embrace Rwanda music,” he says. “While Rwanda had been in my heart before, this time I fell deeply in love with it in my heart and I said that this love would never end.” FESPAD opened his eyes to other African music, culminating in him releasing his first album Dunia Yote in 2000. “People who knew my music were surprised by this turnaround. But I felt the African beat in my heart, flowing through my veins.” And the world began to notice. In 2003, his second album Ngagara in which he reminisced about his childhood memories of Ngagara, was picked by CBC and distributed by the famous Universal Distributors. Success after success followed Mighty Popo, with him winning many awards including Juno awards and his album Muhazi winning the Best World Music Album of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Award. From this success, he says, he wanted to look for a broom with which he could even sweep a corner in his country that had been dirtied by past conflicts and the genocide. “I felt that I had to do something seeing that Rwanda had talented musicians that only needed international exposure since they could perform on international stage. I had been there myself and felt that this was where Rwanda talented musicians needed to be, to climb a higher pedestal and reach the highest pinnacle of success.” Mighty Popo thus approached a group of musician friends in Canada and together they came up with a model that he had seen in other countries. That’s how KigaliUp Festival was conceived, to make it easier for Rwanda artists exploit their talents. KigaliUp is an annual festival through which known and unknown Rwandan artists join together and share stage and network with their international counterparts. “My love for Rwanda is unconditional,” he says. “It’s in my blood and the sweat of people who liberated the country from bloodthirsty wolves that were devouring it at that time with impunity. I told myself it was my duty to participate in the welfare of my fellow citizens in however small way. When you don’t do something for your country, then you don’t love your country,” says Mighty Popo. Another opportunity to help clean his country presented itself when he was approached by WDA, under Technical Vocational Education Training programme of opening vocational schools throughout the country to teach youth skills and create jobs. He was to the manager of School of Music they were planning to open in Rubavu District, a challenge he said he took with relish. “I felt honored to be the first manager of such ambitious project geared towards changing the lives of the youth in this country. We sat together and formulated a plan through which the country’s talented youth in music were to be taught skills matching the international standards.” Mighty Popo says that the youth should be thankful of their country, saying that the government has formulated many programs they should won irrespective of their age. “There’s a subterranean cultural revolution happening and the youth are the pushers of this. It’s unseen but you feel it there, that it’s happening. They are raising their own consciousness.” I ask him where this name Mighty Popo came about. “Oh, Popo was my nickname when I was young. However, there was this band leader called Larry Mootham who used to introduce me to audience as ‘Mighty Popo’ even though I was quite a skinny man with skinny legs at that time.” If given another chance to re-live his childhood, Popo says that he would choose to live in Ngagara from where his journey through life began. “Over and over, Ngagara of that time is still in my mind,” he says.