SAUTI SOL’S BIEN: WE LOST ALL OUR MONEY, I HAD TO DROP OUT OF SCHOOL

By Cheptoek Boyo | August 28, 2020

Sauti Sol’s lead singer Bien Amie Baraza shared his family experience and how it molded him into a man he is and shaped his relationship with money, work and people.

Speaking at Engage Talk, he said, “I hate githeri, my childhood is one that many you would passive as privileged. I grew up in the lush neighbourhoods of Kilimani, my dad was the alpha male both financially and in his masculinity.

I remember his friends were also loud, they had so many parties, every other weekend it was nyama choma and beer. There were always people coming to our house every other morning for handouts, today was school fees and tomorrow was funerals.

My dad was always their superhero, sorting everybody out and putting himself last, and always giving gems of advice to everybody he gave handouts to.”

After his parents lost their jobs their lives changed drastically, “My sister and I were enrolled in a very competitive boarding school basically is where the rich people took their children to be programmed to pass national exams.

All was fine until it wasn’t, in 2000 my dad lost his job, he was the director of projects in a well know NGO and their funding was cut abruptly. My mum was retrenched in the famous Y2K era and just like that our household had no income.

My mum came to pick my sister and me from boarding school and she came in a cab, which was very awkward because at the time she always came to pick us with my dad or the driver.

She let us know she and dad were out of work and as a family, they had to do some changes to readjust to the situation, and we have had to move to a smaller house.  

From Kilimani we moved to a place called Kamura, the house was less than half the size of where we used to live before, me and my sister were pretty understanding kids. I slept in the living room in that house.

I remember when things started going south, my dad had sold his car and we were eating githeri a bit too often. It just became a staple in the house day after day.

After a while we could not pay the rent for the house, my dad had been building with his left-over savings in a place called Nkoroi and even though the house wasn’t finished we moved in any way.

The house was completely unfinished, no celling, it was not painted, the floors were not done, the basic plumbing in the house was also not done basically we lived in a shack smack in the middle of April rains.”

His family sold all their electronics to make ends meet, “By this point, things were thick because we had sold all our electronics, but we didn’t need them anyway. We planted maize and beans in our new place and we had a bumper harvest, which meant more githeri.

I fondly remember the smell of firewood when mum would boil githeri for what would be a week’s menu. My sister and I were out of school for a year because we could not afford to go to the private school we were going to and my parents would not enroll us in the public schools in the surrounding area.

A lot of my friends wanted to come and visit me both from my past neighbourhood and school but I was embarrassed about the whole situation because I didn’t want them to see us in that new law. It’s not like my parents were not trying to get jobs.

In fact, more than one-time mum and dad sent me to the post office with their CVs. I remember them writing and compiling them in the house with all the hope they put behind every stamp. All responses came with ‘we regret’ all the time they open the letter it crushed them just a little bit. At some point they stopped sending me to the post office.

That same year mum lost both her parents and she was broken. We used to pray every evening as a family for God to get us out of the situation. I just asked myself where was God when we were eating githeri every time. When my grandparents died six months apart. When my parents were applying for these jobs and getting ‘we regret’, I things were so bad I literary watch my father give up.

Mum held the fort while dad sat in the verandah the whole day reading the bible and talking to himself, wallowing in depression. I was angry, where were my dad’s friends? Where were all the guys he used to drink with? where were all the relatives who used to come to our house?

It was humiliating, my sister and I were the poster child of being kicked out of school for not paying fees. We had debts all over the neighbourhood, we couldn’t borrow anything from any shop anymore. That was rock bottom.”

The experience changed his relationship with money, “My family experience did everything to mold me to the man I am today, it scarred me for life. It changed my relationship with money, anything I get I understand the need for delayed gratification, I save.

Sometimes I give then I’m reminded of my father giving and how when he needed nobody came to give him. It changed how I am in terms of how I spend, you are never going to hear a story of Bien popping bottles in a club on his own tab.

It changed how I am as a husband I can’t imagine Chiki looking at me going through what my dad was going through at that time, I ran from that every day and make sure Chiki won’t have to see me through the lens of my mother’s eyes.

It changed my relationship with people, are my friends really my friends? That situation helped me build discipline in my craft, to make sure I wake up every morning to work so hard so that I don’t have to go back there again.”