Reminsicing Gwamba’s move

We all make choices and, sometimes, we just must make them hard.

Local hip hop’s big name Gwamba made his a few weeks ago. He sailed from the shores of ‘ordinary’ music to the gospel realm. And true to the largesse of the move, the gravel on which hip hop stands on caught a vibration.

He was a hit for his material former world, and surely there are people that went on to love hip hop for the love of the star.

So, from the barber’s chair, I listened with unwavering attention to the stories that customers, the host and the many that just throng the rendezvous to while the hours away, swapped about Gwamba’s move.

As the noisy clippers competed with the din of the battered radio set and its oversize speakers, the addition of the many mouths contributing to the issue almost got me deaf.

Gwamba this, Gwamba that.

I gathered many boys of the ghetto will miss Gwamba. They reminisced how Gwamba’s intoxicating live shows made their weekends.

You see, just like any of us, Gwamba too has a private life. It is from this that he chose tiny bits and soft truths to throw at fans in his lyrics. Only he knows the full picture of his life and it is only from his inner world that he can decide what to do with his talent.

The big change and its motives are his prerogative.

The boys of the ghetto will always search around for a replacement, simple. But Gwamba will have to search for a whole new world; a whole new face and perhaps a whole new listenership, all in the wake of hard judgements that are already in the air.

Every time he catches his past on the street, radio or television, he will have to deal with it — being the new creation he became at the flip of his coin. That is a big task and let him concentrate on that for now.

I only hope the legacy continues. First it was from Armstrong to Onesimus. Now it may be Gwamba to ‘Twosimus!’