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00:00 We're staying with Rwanda now because our culture team has also been in Kigali to discover the
00:06 artistic scene and meet some of those who are rewriting Rwanda's creative future. Our culture
00:14 editor Eve Jackson is with me to tell us a little more. Eve. All this week on our daily culture show
00:20 Arts24 we're bringing you portraits of Rwandan artists now to give you some background about
00:26 Rwanda. It's a fascinating place, they call it the country of a thousand hills and it's known
00:31 for its breathtaking scenery and even in the capital Kigali it is pretty breathtaking,
00:36 it's tiny, it's only got a population of 14 million and the capital Kigali, it's spotless,
00:42 it's safe and it's buzzing. Paul Kagame of course has been president since 2000 and is said to lead
00:49 with an iron fist so it wasn't always that easy to talk about political situation there but we did
00:56 get to talk about lots of other things and more than three quarters of Rwandans were actually born
01:00 after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis and so the population is incredibly young, incredibly
01:07 talented and it's very inspiring. The artists we met talked openly about the effect, the trauma of
01:13 the genocide even if they weren't alive then has had on them sort of the intergenerational trauma.
01:18 One of the musicians we met you can see there is called Kaya Bintchi, she performed a song for us
01:24 which is called The Colour of Blood, it's a reflection of her country's dark past, take a listen.
01:29 It's the same source we came from, the same air we breathe in, beyond the colours of our skin,
01:45 beyond beliefs and races. The Colour of Blood is inspired by my experience with so many different
01:52 people from different places but also it's pushed by the story of my country. When you
02:01 kill somebody else, it's a person, their colour is red so for me it was that symbol of what we
02:10 have in common but with the idea behind that we are all the same despite our differences.
02:15 Now Eve as you say with more than three quarters of Rwandans being under the age of 30,
02:25 youth culture has its very own musical genre, they've created it to talk about their everyday
02:31 lives, tell us a bit about it. That's right and it's called, this wave of popular rap music is
02:35 called Kinyetra, it's in the Kinyarwanda language and we actually went to the studio of one of its
02:40 founders, Busheli you can see there, who is a mega star in Rwanda and he arrived with superstar
02:47 energy straight out of the gate, he's been delivering hit after hit for the last 10 or so
02:52 years, he's on his fifth album, he's only 24 and it's called Full Moon, it's out later this year.
02:58 His songs, even though we don't understand them but he explained them to us, paint a picture of
03:03 the urban trials and tribulations in Rwanda, in Rwanda 40% of the population do live under
03:11 the poverty line and that is a world from which he comes and that's what he sings about.
03:15 Young people love Kinyatrap because they see themselves in it.
03:33 It's music with meaning, I sing about underprivileged kids coming home from school
03:39 and going to sleep on hard cement, they can identify with me because I'm like them and I'm young too.
03:47 And Eve, throughout this week on Arts24 you're bringing us portraits of artists and of fashion
03:57 designers. Well there's so many artists that we got to meet, we visited one of Kigali's top fashion
04:02 houses, it's called Motions and it was founded in 2015 by Moses Turahirwa. Now he is known for
04:09 reimagining traditional Rwandan motives into contemporary pieces. Ivorian footballer Didier
04:16 Drogba is one of his clients, so is the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. So he does have
04:22 international fans around the world, he is planning as well a fashion show here in Paris
04:26 in May and he is taking fashion to the next level.
04:30 Rwandan fashion scene is very new, since the 90s we had only like one factory making the clothing,
04:41 it was not a culture at all, so I think it's on the rise where it can be spotted as something new
04:48 and it has a very bright future.
04:50 If you want to watch some of these reports in detail or a special show that we filmed in Kigali
04:58 you can check out our website at france24.com, the show is called Arts24 of course
05:02 and that will be on all this week.
05:04 Fabulous, I want to see more of that fashion. Thanks very much Eve Jackson for us there.