Maraza opens up about his broke struggles

Rapper Maraza has paid the price for his dreams, including several months with no money to pay his rent.

During an interview with Slikour recently, Maraza revealed that he is "a couple of hundred grand deep" at the moment. But it wasn't always like that.

Speaking candidly, Maraza said that there was a period of his life last year that he was struggling to make ends meet.

"January last year I didn't have a car. I was a few months behind on rent, even. I didn't have tons of money poured into me. I was literally surviving off a salary on a monthly basis. Taking care of the house I was living in, taking care of my mother who lived elsewhere, taking care of other family members back home and saving," he said.

He says that the situation meant he missed out on a number of opportunities and interviews because he could not market himself as an artist properly.

Despite this, the rapper never gave up on his dream. He reveals that once he even spent his rent money on a pair of new studio headphones, believing that it would be better to invest in his musical dreams.

It's a struggle that Maraza is very familiar with.

He says that he never came from money, and was raised in a shack.

"The place I came from, we only got our first tarred road in 2010. My home was corrugated iron walls. It was only when I got here (Joburg) that I realised it was a shack," he says.

Maraza says that his childhood home was like that until 2014, and he tried to help the situation by doing the odd job.