BEGIN TO HOPE: Kenyan-born Patrick Mureithi, who plays at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club this Sunday, December 6 (1221 State St., 7:30pm), knows how to make the best of challenging circumstances and thwarted expectations. Raised on movies of glittering and glamorous Manhattan and Los Angeles skylines, he arrived in Missouri at age 19 at Missouri State with the hopes of furthering the hip-hop prospects of his original group, Zig Zag, who had found some acclaim in Kenya. “I thought I would live the happily-ever-after rap life, so you can understand my disappointment when I came to Springfield and saw two semi-tall buildings and that’s it,” he said.
Disillusionment soon turned to enchantment as he absorbed the rivers and woods of the region, so much so that he now considers himself African-Ozarkian. The lush landscape filled him with creative energy, and he began a very promising songwriting pursuit — that is, until he was crippled by recurrent complications from a previous surgery in his neck that partially paralyzed his guitar-playing hand.
Greater devastations hit, too, both personally and culturally — he lost a younger brother to suicide and witnessed, on television screens, as a devastating near-genocide swept across Kenya in 2007-2008. From these tragedies he felt moved to inspire hope and healing through creativity. He made a documentary, Kenya: Until Hope Is Found, in which he used the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to draw parallels with Kenya, hoping to educate his country away from a similar nightmare. “If we want a peaceful world, we must have more peaceful hearts,” he said.