The Sunday News
Peter Matika, Senior Life Reporter
WHILE most rappers measure their success through flaunting “money”, cars and designer clothes on music videos, talking about how they have made it to the top from the bottom, very few show appreciation to their parents.
Many, if not most promote their over exaggerated vanity by posing and posting pictures of the “latest cars” they drive, clothes they wear, expensive bottles of whatever beverage they drink and in most instances how many people they have slept with.
Unlike her male counterparts in the music game, to name Cassper Nyovest, AKA and the like, it is a totally different story for one South Africa-based Zimbabwe-born female rapper Gigi Lamayne, who recently bought her mother a set of wheels.
Posting on her social network sites she announced about a week ago that she had saved up enough to buy her mother a car.
Although she never mentioned the type of car she had bought for her mother, she said:
“F*** your bottles. F*** a non-believer. Its grind time for my people’s sake,” she wrote on a picture posted on Twitter by music channel MTV (@MTVNewsish), captioned Gigi Lamayne just won’t stop spoiling her mum . . . rapper bought her old lady a car. #DaughterOfTheYear.
For Gigi there is no better way of showing gratitude to the one person that believed in her even through the toughest and darkest hour — her mother. And perhaps buying her mother a car is paying homage to her for holding on through an abusive marriage.
Gigi, who is rather quite outspoken about the trauma of growing up in an abusive home, recently revealed to a South African magazine that she would reconcile with her father when she was strong enough.
“I came from a very abusive background. We were beaten and mentally scarred,” she told Drum magazine.
Gigi has on several occasions noted that her father had served in the army and upon his return home from serving; he quickly became frustrated with the demands of domestic life.
Gigi said that he took out many of those frustrations out on his young family, before his mother divorced him. She has mentioned too that her past has left her with many emotional issues.
“It is something that is always with me. I grew up with a tough life. Abuse at home. My mother going through a whole lot of things that I had to witness and that I also went through. Alcohol abuse, drug intake, my mum crying every day, chairs being thrown in the other room and there’s nothing you could do to help mummy,” Gigi said.
Gigi is perceived as a rapper who is an intimate portrait of young South Africans that reveal the many sub-cultures that define born frees.
Gigi is a rapper like no other, she is unique in so many ways, regarding that she considered educating herself beforehand.
Nowadays it’s easy to write off rappers as nothing more than self-taught entrepreneurs, whose strongest skill is their ability to spit clever lines wrapped in suffocating layers of self-promotion.
It is also a well-known secret that most rappers are not at all concerned with education but are rather concerned with getting high on drugs and alcohol, while promoting exaggerated vanity by posing for pictures to post on social media.
Gigi features on today’s roaster of upcoming and established hip-hop heavyweights comprising of rappers who spend time writing essays and researching on papers to focus on what’s important in their careers.
Gigi, whose real name is Genesis Manney, last year aced subjects: new media, consumer culture, anthropology of the state, and the development of anthropological boards.
The Joburg-based rapper literally took the colloquial term schooling to a new level by completing her undergraduate studies in Media and Anthropology with four distinctions. She graduates from Wits University this year.
A self-proclaimed bookworm, Gigi is said to have been on the dean’s list of students who pass in the top 10 percent of each degree programme since she began her studies at Wits in 2013.
Gigi said education was the key to success and that for her, as a female rapper, it was a milestone achievement, given the social and economic challenges being faced globally. The award-winning rapper has had collaborations with some of the idolised South African rappers such as Khuli Chana.
@peterkmatika
