MY JOURNEY THROUGH THE MAZE (Part 1)
(My Tech Journey Begins)

The first time I saw a computer was in a secretary’s office at Makeni Islamic school in 1995. I was a nine year old boy who had just been transferred to a new school and by then there was a big myth that computers were for secretaries to simply type letters and the famous school fees reminder notes. I don’t know about you but in my case I wasn’t even aware that accountants used computers too, so as a grade 3 (three) a computer wasn’t any better a tool for me since the word computer was synonymous to typing.
Okay everything was about change when brickgames came onto the scene with games like tetris being of great impact and later the Nintendo Gameboy, Telegame Station, Ending Man, Sega, Nintendo 64, Play Station 1 (Games like Street fighter, Mario Bros, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Star Wars Racer etc). It was so much fun to play with all these various innovations, technology began to slowly take its shape, but obviously I wasn’t aware of how anything worked for so long I could consume all the wonderful work of the Gaming companies.

While in sixth grader (1998) chess became a popular sport in my school especially my class with the best Zambian interschools champion Farah Abdallah and four other national competitors being classmates. It was then that I got to know that a chess player could play against a computer, by then I had no idea that all these other gaming tools were computerized. Farah Abdallah had just won himself a scholarship to develop his chess skills online.
In 1999 (grade 7 at age 13) while reading a magazine, I bumped into an article titled “Ten things you should have done or owned by the age thirty”. There were so many things listed and some too silly for the 21st Century child including; learnt to fry an egg, got drunk with your dad, learnt to change a tire on a car, stopped taking laundry to your mom but to your fiance, had sex, but among these was “own a personal computer”. I do not know why but this immediately become my first goal even though I never knew any friend, neighbor, uncle, aunt, relative who owned a computer then. The worst part is that I was just a kid exposed to good education but coming from a Kanyama (a shanty compound in Lusaka, Zambia) with nothing much to show in terms of status apart from my good school grades. However a goal was set, despite not knowing what I would be doing on my computer.

One of my uncles was an accountant and later acquired a computer but unfortunately I wasn’t a favorite and so I would just watch my cousins play games when we visited him in Makeni. Due to school environment and listening to too much radio a developed a passion for music and began rapping with a few friends. While in grade 11 in 2003, I later competed and won few rap contests in “Sprite Show Competition” hosted by Smook IK (Innocent Kalauka and DJ Funky) on Radio 4, Zambia’s national radio station.

During this period (still in grade 11) I auditioned to feature on a music compilation with a small Lusaka based music recording studio called CV Studios, located at Alliance House Cairo Road then and one of the few studios then. A walk into that studio changed everything, it was the beginning of a new journey.
I expected to find instruments like the musical keyboards, drum sets, guitars and many other equipment but what was amazing is there was just a computer, a microphone and these fancy speakers with a gentleman plotting to make a rhythm in a computer with the fancy looking non physical musical equipment. It was so amazing and enjoyed every moment I walked into the booth all the time. I now wanted to be the man doing the musical plotter, become a musical producer. That pushed me towards wanting to learn how to use a computer.
Due to a month of illness in 2004 I wasn’t allowed to sit for my grade 12 exams at Makeni Islamic. I later sat for my exams the next 2005 and went straight to learn the computer basics a week after my exams. It was still hard to find a computer to explore and learn the basics on my own or from a friend and so had to do the introduction, word but didn’t complete excel and access. This was it, I now knew terms like hardware, software, peripherals, click, right click, double click, highlight, drag.
This was the beginning of my tech journey and luckily in 2006 after a failure to secure an income from a marketing job our account uncle gave my cousin a non functional computer that introduced I and my cousin Eugene to computer repairs while we were trying to get parts and software to get it running. It was a Pentium II computer and with it working running on 128 mb ram, 10 gb hard drive and CD Writer on it we began Burning Music Cds, Vcds while learning to make beats on fruity loops (FL Studio) and simple musical recording in Adobe Audition.
I hard my first personal desktop computer in my first computer in 2008, a self built pc that I bought with a few parts missing from a supportive friend, Aston Nyangu. I was tweenty-two years old then and my goal hard been achieved.
But just how did I decide to get into Programming? Watch-out for part two to get to know how the wannabe music producer found his way through the maze and probably out of the maze.
