Imagine this; a teenage girl (introvert and a nerd) surrounded by a group of mean girls (a clique of popular girls), in the sleeping rooms at camp. As you move in closer, you realise the popular girls are taking turns to hurl insults and to point fingers at the girl in the middle. Whenever she tries to speak, she is cut off by one of the girls and finally she is threatened; told that she would be drowned in the river outside the dorm after sunset.
Phones are out and nobody speaks up for her although there are spectators all around. The nerd's name is Genesis Gabriella Tina Manney, aka, Gigi Lamayne.
The above scenario is one of the many stories the rapper shares with Tonight that bring chills to my spine. For a 22-year-old, her story is long, multi-layered and vividly colourful.
Gigi is known to many as one of the emerging female rappers in SA, rapidly etching her name in the hip hop industry. She burst onto the scene with her Tswana, Afrikaans, Zulu and English infused rhymes, making the industry sit up and take notice with songs like “Ice cream”.
She was named Genesis to symbolise a new beginning for her parents. But life seldom works out the way you have planned it and they eventually divorced. She has trouble naming one place as home because she has stayed in Soweto, Lenasia, Orange Grove and “many more places” she assures me. She explains that she doesn't really have friends in all those places because she never stayed long enough to make friends, plus she was in boarding school.
She attended Dominican Convent school from grade 1 to grade 12, but left in March of her matric year because she was bullied. I must admit, it is hard for me to imagine the “hardcore” Gigi in front of me being bullied. More than that, I imagine she means gossip or the average “don't sit at our table kind of high school tactics”.
But she assures me that her situation was worse. “I was thrown into rubbish bins, my food taken away from me, forced to do people's homework and that is not even the worst...” the rapper explains.
“It was a nightmare I lived in for most of my years in school, I did not even realise I had gotten to a point of depression, till I was in matric.
“And I think in matric I lost it. One day I woke up and I couldn't move my legs and my mom was worried, wondering what's going on. I woke in hospital and I was told I had severe depression.”
“I was there for about a month, and this was my matric year, mind you,” she says.
When she came out she wasn't the same anymore and talked to a psychologist, where she emphasised that she would not return to that school. “Because they are going to kill me,” she explained when everyone enquired. Meanwhile, home was no safe haven either, as her mom was a victim of domestic abuse. Gigi's father was a heavy drinker.
“There were times my mom and I lived in a car and sneaked into the BP garage on Empire road to take a bath,” she recalls.
She eventually changed schools and went to Verney College, a multi-racial school. “That 6-7 months that I was there, was the best time of my life, almost like a fresh start.”
Most people from the previous school said she would fail matric, and waited eagerly to watch her failure unfold.
“But man, when I got to Verney, I just started working. I knew that they (the kids from the other school) were watching, so I had to make it!”
Her hard work paid off. She achieved first place in the Gauteng province for Drama and History, with 5 distinctions out of 7 subjects and placed second in her school. What a way to shut her haters up for good.
But Gigi had a lot to say and her channel of choice became rap. From the moment she realised “there's actually nothing wrong with me,” she embraced her art.
iGenesis, Gigi's latest project is a testament to that. It touches on a number of subjects from racism, to bullying, to adoration and love. She laughs as she tries to explain how she went in and out of two relationships in one album. “They each had a year, so my emotions are different and almost ‘schizophrenic’ in the album.
“It's a diary of a young black women and a manual for a young black male trying to fall in love with her,” she says as she sums up iGenesis.
The album is also a party-starter, with turn up songs like “Gumgedlela”, “Shisa”. Gigi feels that she has created the type of album you need to put on repeat because the more you listen to it, the more meaning you will find. “There are so many layers, sub text and plots, that you might miss if you don't listen to understand.”
iGenesis is Gigi’s response to her painful past. “I haven't forgiven them,” she says about those girls that bullied her. “I need to be chilling in my mansion on the hills, and only then I might think about forgiving them.”
“When I win my first SAMA, I am going to give those girls a shout out, because they may not know it but they gave me my drive to succeed.” - IOL