He sings, he acts and is a poet. It’s only natural that David ‘BlackSkillz’ Oyuke scooped this year’s Creative award graduant during the recent Daystar’s University graduation ceremony held at the Athi River campus.
As thousands of students wait to graduate to start looking for jobs and ‘find something’ to do, David started way earlier.
BlackSkillz, as he is commonly known, did not wait for anyone to bestow him with the power to read so as to start his career. In fact, he started it even before he joined campus.
BlackSkillz describes himself as a thinker, a lover of nature, arts, and a spiritual being. He first discovered he had a talent in poetry at the age of 12 years; but he put the gift into practice when he was 17 years, performing a piece ‘bound’ at Kwani – the African literary publishing network. By 2008, he was the official featured poet at Kwani.
As for music, David had his first radio single (a song called Caramel, featuring Charity) play on CapitalFM in 2006 on the lounge. It stayed on the charts for about 2 months. In 2008, his second single with Stan called Le garden played on CapitalFM for a couple of months.
By this time, he had been a recording artist with Penya but later paused his music ambitions to finish his undergraduate. This year, BlackSkillz is back in the studio, and has released his latest song and video ‘way to go’.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o7phPw-uo0&feature=player_detailpage”]
David’s early career was not a walk in the park. In 2006, he got published alongside renown African writers such as Wole Soyinka in an anthology of poems. Sadly, the publisher was conned and given some forged signatures by his liaison. As a result, the anthology had to be pulled off before mass distribution.
“I do believe though that if we are to do the anthology one day and get the same names that were there, it truly will deserve the name ‘Africa’s best stories’,”’ says a nostalgic David.
So what is his answer to the ‘what next after graduation’ question? Well, he intends to continue with music and poetry, to get into ministry, acting and further his education.
Acting is something he discovered quite recently as he explains, “I want to get into mainstream acting as I love acting. I had shied away from it until this year when I was persuaded to be in a student film called the Nairobi report”.
“Don’t chase things that can never last forever. Things that can last forever are not tangible but they exist; love, joy and peace. With this you can achieve any dream you have, have the energy to look for you dream job, and have the necessary charisma to get it,” sums up David.
Loi Awat
July 13, 2012 at 8:41 am
Love this article! Some typos though, e.g. ‘graduation ceremony’ and ‘advices David’ instead of ‘advises David’. There are a whole lot of syntax and grammatical errors as well… I dig the article, but whoever is the editor of this page needs to up their game.
Edwin Kuria
July 13, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Way to go Skillz. Truly deserve the award.
FBO
July 13, 2012 at 12:40 pm
There is a reason they call you SKILLZ man,and this article sums it up!
Jotham King Micah
July 13, 2012 at 1:16 pm
Nice read. All the best to David. Ambition and talent are given to us for a reason.