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“Even though I haven’t been to [America], I feel it in my thoughts and heart. It’s the place where if you are smart enough and if you wanting something enough, you’ll get it,” Cedric Meanu Kiala said.

Kiala is Belgian now , but he was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kiala says that he has little to no memory of the Congo because he left for health reasons when he was very young.

“I couldn’t stay in Africa because I’m an albino and I couldn’t stay in the sun for long, otherwise I would get sick,” Kiala said. “The sun is very bad for me, sunburn could be almost fatal. I had to get out of Congo as quickly as possible, so my mother gave custody to my aunt because she lived in Europe and had money.”

Leaving Congo and then shortly after a brief stay in Angola at the age of three, Kiala spent the next eight years in Switzerland with his aunt, who he says he called “mama” throughout his childhood. Kiala said that his aunt was an extremely strict parent, and that he was a “natural trouble-maker.”

Eventually the two clashed to the point where his aunt revealed to him that she wasn’t his mother. At 11, Kiala found out that his real mother had been living in Germany the last few years looking for work. He convinced his aunt, without much argument from her that it was time to find his real mother.“I met my mother for the first time, I didn’t remember her from Congo,” Kiala said. My aunt just dropped me off and left. She simply told the Swiss authorities that I was going back to live with my father in the Congo. I never met my father, and I never will.”

According to Kiala, his aunt’s initial lie set up a series of events that made it very difficult for Kiala to claim citizenship in Europe. He is currently waiting on the Belgian government to give him his “papers” so that he can leave the country.
Kiala and his mother lived in Germany for a year and a half.
Kiala even got the chance to attend German school, and learn some German. Kiala said his mother had trouble holding down work, and the German authorities eventually “told her it was time to leave the country” because she wasn’t a citizen. Kiala and his mother moved to Belgium where his mother had two other children.

They first moved to the city of Liege. Kiala describes a scene that no tourist book would dare talk about, to him the streets of Liege are “a hot place, crime ridden, crack heads begging for drugs and shit, nothing to live for there.”

Kiala said that he and his mother began to fight when they lived in Liege, to the point where she kicked him out on to the street for long lengths of time as a young teenager.

“I basically grew up on the streets,” Kiala said. “You see, my sister is an angel and I am a demon to my mother at the time. I was living on the street on my own doing my own thing. I ended up spending a lot of my years in juvenile detention centers.”

Kiala added that most of his crimes involved petty theft and “hustling” for a drug dealer friend.

Kiala said he had always felt older than the people that shared the streets with him. One day he said he “woke up.”

“I really changed because I wasn’t worth those evil things,” Kiala said. “I knew I had to change for my future, because I knew I would die. I was really lucky that something came into my head and said I was really better than that, better than hanging around people with felonies who didn’t get shit done.”

He saw his future in the art of rapping. Kiala said that he started listening to rap when he was 11 or so years old, and quickly felt that he had the “skills to rap.” This newfound skill lead Kiala to hone his skills and to leave the streets.

“The thing that made me come to that kind of decision [to rap], was that I was often on my own,” Kiala said. “I didn’t have anyone to help me with certain things. At that level of tragedy you get a certain will, you are obligated to get out of [the street life] because if you don’t do shit, you get stuck, and you just fall off, eventually you die.”

Kiala’s love of art doesn’t stop at rap. He’s a devout fan of such eclectic artists, as Judy Garland, Fleetwood Mac, and the Beach Boys. Kiala said that art to him doesn’t stop at music and art isn’t a simple product or thing, but rather is “like a trip, an unending trip. There is no ending to art -in fact there are endless types of art. Cooking is another art, rapping, singing, music, martial arts all of which I love.”

Kiala has even come up with his own title for himself, “Startist.” He said the word came to him during what he called an “inner-debate.”

He felt like he was a star, in his mind a star is someone who is going to make it big. But he didn’t want to be like other stars, people he believed were focused on one type of art, or focused merely on being popular.

He also saw himself as an artist, and he believes that is essential for a good artist to love all sorts of art and Kiala considers himself an art lover. So the combination of star and artist was natural to him. It represented the sort of balance that he wants to obtain.

“People might think the term [Startist] is dumb or crazy, but to me it’s just a path, a way of living,” Kiala said.

Kiala added that he is young and still trying to learn this “path,” but he says the only advice he can give to anyone is “to follow their own, find what makes you happy and free and follow it.”

Kiala said as a young 12-year-old he loved listening to rap, but he grew tired of having no idea what the English rappers where saying.

“I started to think, why am I listening to something I don’t understand? I just keep nodding my head. What if they are making fun of me? I wanted to understand it so I can feel it and make [raps] myself,” Kiala said.

Kiala said he started going to the library and getting cassettes and books on how to learn English, then he was renting movies and totally immersing himself in the English language. He often quotes the French proverb, which he translated as, “Some people waste their time talking about their dreams, while other people are waking up to fulfill them.”

Kiala says that it was rapping that got him off the streets, which ultimately set him down his “Startist” path.

Now at the age of 18, Kiala raps nearly fluently in English. He hopes to first get his citizenship in Belgium, and then move to the United States to follow his dream of becoming a rapper.

Kiala admits that it won’t be easy. When asked about the violence and racism that so many people talk about in America he says he believes that a country the size of America is bound to have those sorts of problems.

“There is racism, crime, and no public health care in America, but look at Congo my country, young soldiers with guns at nine years old, troubles every where in that country. People don't realize how easy it is in America or even Europe.”