When Fabrice Manirakiza first arrived in Melbourne in 2007, speak no English, elderly, just 14, and far from domestic in Africa, he became afraid. He had by no means heard of Australia before. Worse, in the Tanzanian refugee camp where he had lived out his early teenage years, rumors have been circulating that “white humans devour black people.” “When we arrived at the airport, a white guy was retaining me and my sister’s names – I took into account telling my sister and nephews: ‘That’s the guy who is going to devour us!’ We needed to live away from him,” he chuckles.
To guard themselves against the person-ingesting white humans, Manirakiza insisted that he, his sister, and his young nephews sleep on a single mattress. When a fellow African arrived to go to the newly arrived refugees, Manirakiza admitted his fears. The man laughed. “You’re in a dream, S!” he instructed them. He said there had been a fridge full of meals, just for them, together with chicken, pork, and red meat – meat becomes a luxury he had most effectively ever eaten on Christmas Day. For Manirakiza, it changed into like speaking to “black Jesus in real existence.”
More than a decade later and Manirakiza, 26, now not only speaks fluent English, he has graduated from RMIT with a diploma in the international enterprise; is a motivational speaker who offers talks in faculty throughout Australia, New Zealand, and Africa; and is a member of Melbourne-based entirely rap institution the FLYBZ (who has recorded songs or done with the likes of Paul Kelly, Xavier Rudd, and Angie Hart).
In 2016, Manirakiza was named the Victorian Young Achiever of the 12 months. Now he has been granted the Kirk Robson award on the Australia Council awards to recognize his work with deprived communities. Other winners include seven-time Aria award-winning songwriter and composer David Bridie, Indigenous theatre director Rachael Maza, and Helen Garner for lifetime achievement in literature.
“I’m a storyteller,” Manirakiza tells Guardian Australia. “Music has to turn out to be my platform for sharing my story – most young people get related through music, and music is a language borderless.”
At the age of 8, each of Manirakiza’s dad and mom was murdered in their domestic country of Burundi, a small African state and former Belgian colony torn apart by civil war. At the age of 11, while he was in a college, he was forcibly recruited as a toddler-soldier, escaping a few days later during a purchasing journey. (His 2013 song, providing Paul Soldier,y is titled, Child Soldier.)
Unable to return to a school, where he became concerned he might be kidnapped by the defense force and punished, he ended up on the streets: ingesting, smoking, and sniffing petrol, begging passersby are fill up their vehicles the region some drops into his palms. “I started out living with terrific worry,” he remembers. “I used to cry to myself that I wouldn’t make it to tomorrow.”
Eventually, Manirakiza decided to sign up for his older sister in a refugee camp in Lukoil, Tanzania, undertaking a risky 3-day march across the continent. Life inside the field, he determined, had become a little better. “There were a whole lot of failures, there were numerous sicknesses, there wasn’t sufficient schooling. Living in a refugee camp was more like dwelling in hell,” he says. United Nations meal kits were intended to last a fortnight; they most effectively lasted per week, which meant he became continuously hungry.
