Junior Rumaga, one of the leading Rwandan poets, on Thursday, June 24, dropped the video of his new poem Ayabasore highlighting the tactics boys use to lure girls into having sex with them before marriage. He said that the poem reflects the situation nowadays where boys “desire to taste or have sex with girls before marriage”, which is against the Rwandan culture – insisting that a well-raised Rwandan girl shouldn’t be “tasted” before wedding them. “In the poem, I recite as a boy luring a girl into having sex with me, but in the last stanzas, I reveal that my intention was to challenge her just to see if she was a well-raised girl and could be trustworthy. She passes the test and I want to marry her,” he said. The Umugore Si Umuntu hitmaker is known for poems that address issues that are relevant to society. He does poetry in Kinyarwanda with well-thought-out and crafted poetic lines – a quality that is rarely found with poets of his age. Talking about the video, he said that it was shot in a span of two days; one in the night and the other during the day. He revealed that he doesn’t take a long time to write poems because he draws inspiration from what the people are passing through and instantly composes a poem to help them. Rumaga is focused on dropping as many poems as possible, he said, because he recognises that the Rwandan society needs them and is determined to showcase Rwandan poetry. “In a year, I aim at dropping at least 12 poems,” he said. The poem’s video also features Rwandan actress and spoken word poetess, Ruth Bahali, whose voice demonstrates the girls perspective. “The reason why I decided to use the voice of a girl is because I wanted to show that girls can also craft fantastic poems. I think that this poem will urge some girls to write their own that will base on their perceptions regarding boys’ tricks,” he said. Some of his notable poems include Wumva ute, Ivanjiri, and Tugane iwacu.
