When Michael Kiwanuka won the famous BBC Sound of, 2012 and was nominated for a UK Mercury Prize, Ugandans on social media went ecstatic.
He won and went on to release his debut album, Home Again that year… hearts were blown away by his unique voice that has captured more fans allover the world.
Fast forward to November 2016, the London based Ugandan singer-songwriter s unsurprisingly emerging as a favourite and the bookies’ pick to clinch the Album of the Year at the BBC Music Awards 2016.
With Kiwanuka’s latest album receiving universal critical praise along with the fact his songs had had the most airplay across the BBC’s music radio networks and BBC Music Television over the last 12 months, it seems LOVE & HATE is the frontrunner in all it’s eligible categories.
Very little is known about Kiwanuka’s family apart from the fact that his parents fled Uganda during Idi Amin’s regime.
According to The Telegraph, one of them was an electronic engineer while the other was a cleaner. Whether the two were related to Uganda’s Amin-era tragic Prime Minister Benedicto Kiwanuka is not known, as the artiste remains fiercely secretive about his personal life.
Kiwanuka grew up in a neighborhood of north London called Muswell Hill.