Kaggwa Andrew
Disclaimer: I have many Kenyan friends.
That said, the Kenyan creative industry is a slippery slope, especially when you are Ugandan asked to work with them. To say that most Kenyans in the creative sector will not actually be collaborative is an understatement, these guys will actually try to sabotage you.
If it’s live TV production, you may need heaven and all the angels… those people can put your presenter on air and overexpose them or with very bad makeup… oh, they can form cliques and even just rebel…. I don’t know if they just do it to Ugandans, but Kenyans…. Those guys can make you hate doing art altogether if they are your first collaborators.
I will not even talk about them sharing previous year briefs only for you to sweat for a weekend making research and planning, only to be given a fresh brief on the first revert, and then deleting updates from shared documents….
Basically, Kenyans in the creative space can be toxic.
One time, while working on one of those M-Net films, the Kenyan supervisors approved a script and with the approval came a deadline which was eight days away. Like they wanted us to cast, scout locations, rehearse and send them a director’s cut in eight days. For those that don’t know a directors cut is a complete film…. Mixed, mastered, longer and still open to edits. In writing, a director’s cut is a 3000-word article, well edited but there’s only space for 2000 words thus it must be tightened. A director’s cut is not a rough cut.
Anyway, since time wasn’t enough, people submitted rough cuts where some parts even still had green screens, just to show these guys the progress. Those Kenyans programmed those films in that bad state and didn’t change them even when people gave them better copies… like what’s that?
Anyway, the reason I wrote all this, Mitch is right…. I was naive thinking it’s only Kenyans of today that are malicious towards non-Kenyans….. again, in the creative space. I don’t know about other sectors, probably those are good people
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Ugandan Arts and Culture Journalist. Film and theatre enthusiast. Photojournalist.
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