Arrow Bwoy: The strange thing I once did to separate my fighting parents

Kenyan musician Arrow Bwoy has revealed that he grew up in a family which was marred by domestic violence.

Arrow Bwoy, the last born in a family of three siblings [all boys], said on K24 Television’s Up-Close with Betty Show on Friday, November 29, that he was born and raised in Huruma, Nairobi, to a Ugandan mother and Kenyan father of Luhya descent.

“My mum and dad used to physically fight, a lot!” Arrow Bwoy told host Betty Kyallo.

“Their fights were so bad, that other pupils in school would ridicule me, saying: ‘Look, your father beats up your mother every day…”

“Of course, living in such an environment affected my education and well-being,” said the Digi Digi hit-maker.

So regular and vicious were the domestic fights that Arrow Bwoy had to intervene one day when he thought he had had enough of his parents’ wrangles.

“I had just arrived home from school, when I saw mum and dad fighting each other out in the open. I got so angry, but I did not have the physical strength to separate them. You know what I did? I picked up a very large stone, and when they had created a fairly big gap between them, I threw the stone in the space between them. The stone smashed against a wall, and they immediately stopped fighting. They, thereafter, looked at me, with each of them accusing me of wanting to hit him or her,” said Arrow Bwoy.

The musician advised couples to refrain from domestic violence, saying: “Marital problems or relationship wrangles cannot be solved through physical fights, never. I urge couples to sit down and amicably solve their differences without resorting to violence.”

Arrow Bwoy said his father had other women, besides his mother, whom he sired at least 21 children with.

The artiste said, given his parents were not rich, he had to struggle to get an education, and it got to a point — in secondary school –, when he had to drop out and fend for himself.

He was first employed as an attendant at a butcher’s shop in Nairobi’s City Market in 2011, before later venturing into music, which, he says, has been paying his bills.