5 days ago
God Knows: ‘My brother says we're not culchies. We are. If I throw a stone, I hit a cow'
I moved to Ireland in 2001. Prior to that, my family lived in Sheffield for a year, but then we settled in Ireland because my dad got a job at Shannon Aerospace. I've been here ever since.
The biggest culture shock when we moved to the UK was how protective my parents suddenly became. That's not to say that I lived in the safest neighbourhood in Zimbabwe – I knew the perils of going out when it was dark in certain places – but as a kid I was lucky to have family all over the place, and I'd be able to walk to my uncle's house an hour away without needing to hold my parents' hand.
In that way, moving to Sheffield was so shocking, because suddenly my parents were so protective. I think it's because in Sheffield at the time, there was a young Nigerian boy who had been stabbed. It was all over the news, and I think it was a racial attack, which just made my parents think: let's not even leave this up to chance. That all changed when we moved to Shannon. Finally we could just roam around and be kids again. I grabbed that and ran with it.
Shannon was the first planned town, and because of that, it just felt so safe from the beginning. There was a real sense of innocence that the kids in the UK didn't seem to have. That said, this was around the time of 9/11, so there was a fear in the air, which did lead to discrimination and microaggressions. In Shannon at that time, a lot of people had never seen black people in the flesh before.
READ MORE
A lot of people used to sing Jamaica's Got a Bobsled Team or Gangsta's Paradise to me. It's because Cool Runnings and Dangerous Minds [the films in which they feature] were on TV pretty regularly. When people would sing them to me instead of saying hello, I was kind of like: Okay, nice to meet you too. But I started to get it, because the same thing happens in reverse to missionaries in Zimbabwe. People sing Sting or The Police's song to them. I think it's supposed to be a term of endearment, and anyone could forgive that. But these are the kinds of things that stick with you.
[
God Knows Jonas: 'I'm 100% Irish but I'm also 100% Zimbabwean'
Opens in new window
]
I also got a lot of people mentioning Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president at the time, to me, even though I was just 11.
There's the other side that is rarely spoken about. I think a lot of the discrimination black people faced in Ireland around that time came from the likes of ads from Oxfam and Concern. The only image Irish people would have seen of black people, or Africa, were the clips of kids with flies in their eyes. The world wasn't globalised the way it is now, where you can see a wealthy African kid do a dance on TikTok. It's the same way we see
Gaza
now. That kind of thing is a learned behaviour, rather than coming instinctively, so there is hope for us all.
Music is a way of life where I'm from. We love music so much that we don't have a problem if someone's playing loud music next door. Music is life, because we come from a place of deep poverty, so that distraction was a very welcome and loved thing. My uncle, Cde Chinx Chingaira, was a famous musician. He was regularly number one, and in movies. He actually played Connolly's of Leap, which is something I only found out when I played recently. In Africa it's really normal to know the big songs from all the different countries. Like, even today, I can tell you the biggest songs from Nigeria, The Ivory Coast ... I find it weird that we don't know music from Sweden or Norway unless something really cuts through.
My Irishness, for me, comes from pride of place. It's not based on a maroon passport, I'll tell you that now. I love being Irish. I love living in Ireland, especially the countryside. My brother was arguing with me on this recently, saying that because we live in a town, we're not culchies. But I was like, we are absolutely culchies. If I throw a stone, I can hit a cow. That's culchie. It's a compliment to me and not to him; that's because a stigma does exist. But I think everyone should love where they're from.
I realised that when everybody was telling me to move to England or America because I rap, and that doesn't really happen here. But then I was like, why don't we make it like Bob Marley and those guys made Trenchtown? Or how Wiley and Dizzy make being from east London? I'm hoping that one day people get to be like, Yo, Co Clare gave us Denise Chaila, and Limerick gave us Strangeboy and Citrus and Pellador. I want people to be proud to say, 'That's my neck of the woods'. Because I think sometimes we don't embrace our own things, and we really, really should.
In conversation with Kate Demolder. This interview is part of
a series
about well-known people's lives and their relationship with Ireland. God Knows' album A Future of the Past is out on September 26th. He plays Sounds From A Safe Harbour in on September 12th in Cork City
