It would have been very easy for Ezra Kwizera to be consumed by hate.
Born in Uganda of Rwandan parents, the African-Canadian musician grew up with harsh realities. Many of his relatives, classed as ethnic Tutsi, had perished at the hands of Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of the early 1990s, which claimed between 500,000 and 1 million lives in the space of only 100 days.
His immediate family had come to Uganda before that, but it was scarcely an ideal refuge from conflict, as the excesses of the Idi Amin regime gave way to violent civil war. Kwizera, as a young boy, found himself literally dodging bombs and bullets in a Kampala slum where Rwandan refugees were forced to live in close proximity to thieves and prostitutes.
At the age of only 14, he returned to a Rwanda technically at peace – but found it plagued by the raw wounds of a nation too long at war with itself.
But, thanks to meeting the Canadian woman he later married, Kwizera’s life took a positive direction.
Today, instead of continuing a cycle of hatred, Kwizera is dedicated to promoting a message of love, reconciliation and common human values, and he’s using what he knows – music – to help make a difference in his ancestral country, while continuing to build an audience in his adopted homeland of Canada.
A concert this Friday at Blue Frog Studios, launching Kwizera’s newest album, Humera, is a fundraiser for a cherished project – establishing a pragmatic, industry-based school for mentoring and building professional careers for talented young Rwandan musicians in the country’s capital, Kigali.
Supported by Blue Frog, in collaboration with local musician/live music promoter Jim Widdifield (Club 240), the ticketed event will also be live-streamed to Internet viewers around the globe who will have an option to donate towards the $320,000 it will take to build the school.
“We were talking about a pay-per-view streaming originally,” said Blue Frog co-owner Kelly Breaks. “But then we thought the most important thing was to get it out there and let people decide what they could afford to contribute. We’re touched by what he’s doing.”
“This means a lot more to me than just music,” Widdifield said, adding that, for him, it is a chance to create a legacy in memory of his son Craig, killed in a South Surrey shooting four years ago.
“At the time Craig passed away one of his goals was wanting to do something to help children in third world countries,” he said.
But music, naturally, will be the focus of the evening, and those who will be seeing Kwizera for the first time – as well as those who have discovered him in restaurant concerts and open mic gigs around Greater Vancouver, where he has worked under the moniker ‘Ezraman’ – are in for a multi-ethnic treat.
As a vocalist/guitarist/djembe percussionist, Kwizera – a stadium-filling pop star in Rwanda before he came to Canada eight years ago – has a magical touch fusing such diverse influences as Reggae, Soca, East African Bongo and pop, while singing in multiple languages including English, Kinyarwanda, Luganda, Zulu and Swahili.
The members of his group couldn’t be much more ethnically mixed, Kwizera explained – the drummer is Jamaican, the keyboardist is Israeli, the bassist is Congolese/Kenyan, the three Canadian-born backup singers include a First Nations member and the three dancers are Rwandan/Kenyan Canadians.
“The message of my band is to show people we’re one, and we need to work together,” Kwizera said, adding that the starting point for all his songs are stories drawn from human experience – whether happy or sad.
“Otherwise it’s just empty.”
The Vancouver-based musician, while making a life in Canada (he and his wife Mona Hempelmann are raising their two children here) has retained strong ties to the music industry in Kigali, where he has a recording studio and has often mentored young performers in all aspects of music production.
“Now I want to expand it,” he said. “Rwanda is a landlocked country – it’s resource is the people.
“The only way I can help the country fight against the past is to teach them how to work, and the only way I know how to do that is through music.”
Acknowledging that he was a high school dropout, Kwizera noted it was his passion for music that helped him survive and begin to study meaningfully.
Learning to let go of hate took a little longer, he said – when he first went to Rwanda he discovered that some 90 per cent of his relatives had been killed by Hutus during the genocide.
“For me to forgive, it took a Canadian (Hempelmann) to ask me to come and volunteer at an orphanage. At first I wanted to help her, not to help them.”
Many of the children at the orphanage were the offspring of Hutus, he realized. As he worked with them, he began to see them, not as representatives of the people responsible for killing his people, but simply as children.
That was the key to break the self-destructive cycle of hate, he said.
“That’s when I realized I needed to move on, to forgive. I needed to love. I found myself with forgiveness, as I found myself forgetting my bitterness toward the Hutus.
“Forgiveness is not just for the other person – it’s for you.”
Friday’s showtime is 7 p.m. The venue is located at 1328 Johnston Rd.
For tickets call 604-542-3055. or visit www.bluefrogstudios.ca