Jenesis Kimera left a Bachelor of Arts in Music at Makerere in the first semester of his third year. On Friday, he releases his fourth EP. By any syllabus, he is now several credits ahead of the course he put on hold.
Why He Left
Ronald Kimera Ssenteza, who records as Jenesis Kimera and Orijinal Jenesis, grew up in Kawempe and began recording around 2017. He enrolled in 2018. Tuition was tough, and then COVID arrived. After almost two years of lockdown, he decided his school time was done for now, and he may yet go back and finish the degree. In May 2022, he released his first single, Wansi. His bio line, YOU CAN’T STYLE A STYLIST, reads as a claim about who decides what he sounds like. The catalogue is the evidence.
The Record So Far
Risky Business arrived in 2024, Unscripted in 2025, and Up All Night late that year. He wrote every track on Unscripted and co-produced several. He says he has produced 70 per cent of his catalogue, which has eased the financial burden. The language comes from the village, from Kawempe, and from the rooms where he works.
His standard shows in a smaller decision. On Kampala, he wrote the chorus, found the pitch too high for him, and had Walter YT deliver it properly. The remix, with A Pass, Nigel Beats, and Walter YT, has passed 67,000 plays on Spotify.
The Book Is Different
The first three EPs were his alone. The Book is his first collaborative EP with a producer, and Tryton Muzik is its main collaborator, so it is a shared project. BANGYI leads it, and Kaboo mixed and mastered it.
Authorship, in his case, has never meant doing everything. It means deciding who does what, from a chorus he gave to Walter YT to an EP he now shares. His audience is still modest, at about 7,300 monthly Spotify listeners, and it is early. That is the stage this page exists for: the standard is already visible, and the results have not yet caught up.
Anyone making work this way in Kampala will recognise the standard. Few people see it while it is happening. Friday is a good day to look.
The Book drops Friday, 23 October.
