About Me pt1

Martin Mutabazi Semugeshi was born in Pune, Ruby Hall India, in the province of Maharashtra on August 24, 1987 to African parents Jonas and Rachel Semugeshi. His father moved to India from Africa as a working-student  to pursue a (MBA) Masters in Business Administration from Spicer College where he stayed for ten years. The couple were said to have honeymooned in Europe and India, where his father resided while making frequent travels as a Canvasser to Europe selling books to support the family with his first new born and education. After two years of life his sister Monika Uwamwiza was also born in India at which time the family decided to move to Jamaica, Caribbean, in late 1989 where they resided in the parish of Manchester, Mandeville.

Martin’s parents travelled to Jamaica for the purpose of studying at the tertiary level. Not long afterwards his brother David Muhire was added to the family of four. His father who was already a master’s degree holder at the time was successfully able to gain employment at West Indies College teaching lower level business administration courses. It was through this channel that he was able to support his wife to pursue a BSc in Nursing at the same college.

As time progressed Martin was enrolled in the West Indies College Preparatory school, a Seventh - day Adventist Institution, at the tender age of four yrs, in which he recalls, for the most part, in his own words, was a bitter okay experience for him.  At first he remembers that he was constantly bullied by other kids because of his ethnic background and peculiar nature at which time he did not yet understand. On another occasion, while in Kindergarten, he was almost forced to change his writing hand from left to right. Being a 'lefty' was considered abnormal and strange as very few children practiced with the left hand.

 In addition he says it was his ‘funny name’ that amused most of the kids in the school. Teachers would complain that Martin was a very strange, odd and quiet child except when it came to food. Among other things he recalls that he was grossly chubby, in which he was teased and name-called more than once by his peers. Although quiet and reserved, he was a well behaved child who never got into much trouble, except while playing rough with other few friends. Nevertheless he seems to recall the first poem he ever wrote in fourth –grade during English class and his teachers applaud at a job well done and, he adds, his remarkable spelling and note taking ability which all came naturally to him for some strange reason. Still he remembers a very caring girl  that captivated his attention in the fourth grade; he took this innocent crush very seriously to heart when things fell apart.

Ethnic background

Around 1994 a tragic event happened that would change his life and the life of the family forever.Rwanda, the home of his parents, became the focus of international reports as the world witnessed one of the bloodiest black on black crimes in human history. It was genocide on a massive scale toward the eastern part of Africa that saw most of his distant relatives like cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents slaughtered mercilessly by fellow citizens. Even at the age of seven, he recalls the instant the news broke as, “a family gathering for weeping”. Hence growing up without much connectivity with his distant family he was devided between two worlds, namely that of his parents' and that of the culture surrounding the island.

It was because of those unforeseeable circumstances at that moment that Martins life was forever changed. And while at a week of prayer service in his primary school, he was deeply touched and decided to be baptized at the age of nine into the Seventh-Day Adventist christian Church. Despite the tragic occurrence life went on, he then graduated from Preparatory school in 1999 at the age of eleven where he moved on to secondary education. He attended the Manchester high, a secular school, from 1999-2001 where he described his experience as a 'temptation' and confusion of identity. In his own words it was an environment where he was not getting good grades, was not focused, but as he says- it was one pressure after another. Not knowing himself at the time, his parents, seeing the moral deterioration of the child decided to transfer him to Victor Dixon High, a christian school, where he improved miraculously in performance and sociability. He pursued the arts as an alternative to sciences where he was managing fairly well.

He stayed at Victor Dixon from 2001- 2004 where he sat the CXC examination and qualified for University with seven passes. Young as he was, it was the years that followed that would be his redemption as he through a set of experiences was able to unlock himself to a history and identity that belonged uniquely to him. And while he did not fully know at the time the real cause of the ‘confusion’ he was experiencing around the environment he was living in, through a set of circumstances he calls‘divinely arranged’ he finally was enabled to open himself up to be taught about his true identity. And this made all the difference in the years to come as he was slowly able to retouch the ugly blemishes of the unfinished painting of his early past, rejecting the lies and accepting the reality of his worth being reborn into a new understanding of himself and the world around him.

(Stay tuned for part 2)

Draft 1

A shallow autobiography of

Martin Mutabazi Semugeshi