Batabazi

The word “Batabazi” means Wonderers, people always on the move. The Batabazi used to be a big group of six people but with time it has become a duo. Some have ended up in prison, involved in street clicks and others continued with school. Right now Batabazi consists of 2 wonderers / warriors PG and Jerome Black.

Jerome Kiwanuka, a member of Batabazi, got into the art of music and writing in 1996. At this point he was listening to 2Pac and went to different competitions with Lumix and Lyrical G; they all lived in Ntinda and used to hang out together. He also did various Karaoke competitions organized by silk where Krayzie Native now Saba Saba won a phone. The second Karoake competition which was organized by Zain (then Celtel) they tied with Lyrical G and they both won free membership to Club Silk. Jerome went off the hip-hop scene but continued with the Poetry.

In 2001 Jerome moved to the US. He had a lot of access to stuff that would help him enhance his talent, so he decided to do his music again. While in the states he used to throw house parties where he rapped and this helped him come back in the hip-hop game. He met PG who was then known as DJ PG, he used to rap and deejay. They started doing gigs and curtain-raised for different Boston artists together and met other people along the way thus forming the Batabazi

Along their walk to stardom they met De-Bri, but could not speak a Luganda word, so Jerome decided to do the Luganda for the Ugandan crowd while De-Bri did the English. He later on decided to flip between Luganda, English and Swahili.

Batabazi Squad was officially founded in 2005. They were at a house party at PG’s house, they decided to form a group called “Warriors” and named it Batabazi. “Many people say that their name are contradicting or is similar to the Bataka, But these are two different words meaning completely different things” says Jerome. Jerome continues to say that there is no “beef” between them and the Bataka Squad. They used to do beefing hip-hop music but discovered that it would not help them. Batabazi want to do positive hip-hop so that their kids would be to listen to their music too.