Africa shouldn’t be in need of exceptional tales. It’s in need of Africans telling them.
That perception is driving entrepreneur Julius Kyazze past music, leisure and enterprise into what he sees as one of many continent’s subsequent nice inventive frontiers: African storytelling.
The Swangz Avenue co-founder says Africa has spent a long time consuming tales produced elsewhere whereas leaving a lot of its personal historical past, cultures and heroes undocumented.
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“There are such a lot of African tales that haven’t been instructed,” Kyazze says.
For a person whose companies have helped form East Africa’s leisure business, the difficulty extends past movie and tv. It’s about id, heritage and who will get to outline Africa’s story.
Kyazze argues that generations of Africans have grown up figuring out extra about European monarchies, American celebrities and overseas historical past than the kingdoms, traditions and personalities that formed their very own communities.
He factors to historic figures akin to Kabaka Mwanga and Omukama Kabalega, saying their tales deserve deeper and extra balanced examination.
“I am not saying every little thing they did was proper,” he says. “However I need to perceive these tales. I need to know what motivated their actions and what we will be taught from them.”
His curiosity stretches past Uganda. He wonders how cultures throughout Africa intersect, why languages spoken tons of of kilometres aside share similarities and the way communities have preserved traditions with out absolutely documenting their origins.
For Kyazze, these questions current alternatives for filmmakers, writers, journalists and digital content material creators.
He believes the continent is sitting on an enormous archive of information that dangers disappearing as aged custodians of tradition go away with out recording their recollections, histories and traditions.
To him, preserving Africa’s heritage can not rely solely on books, school rooms or conventional documentaries.
Digital platforms akin to TikTok, YouTube, podcasts and short-form video, he says, have created highly effective new methods to protect tradition and introduce it to youthful audiences.
“Perhaps not every little thing must be written in a ebook anymore,” he says. “Perhaps it is a TikTok explaining how the Karamojong marry. Perhaps it is a brief video telling the story of one other neighborhood.”
Kyazze believes the continent’s biggest problem shouldn’t be an absence of tales however a failure to recognise storytelling as each a cultural accountability and a viable financial alternative.
As international demand for genuine African content material grows throughout streaming platforms, publishing and digital media, he says many Africans stay customers of tales fairly than creators and homeowners of them.
“The tales which have been instructed about Africa have largely not been instructed by us,” Kyazze says.
His feedback come at a time when Africa’s inventive financial system is attracting rising worldwide funding via movie, music, publishing and digital content material, with streaming platforms commissioning extra African productions and younger creators constructing careers via on-line platforms.
But Kyazze believes the continent’s biggest alternative stays largely untapped.
It lies in documenting extraordinary lives, forgotten histories and residing cultures earlier than they’re misplaced.
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He envisions a future the place a toddler in Mbarara understands the traditions of Karamoja as simply as they’ll clarify Britain’s royal household, and the place Ugandans know as a lot about neighbouring communities as they do about Hollywood.
The imaginative and prescient displays a broader shift in Kyazze’s personal ambitions.
Having constructed a popularity for locating musicians and growing leisure companies, he’s more and more targeted on creating techniques that allow Africans to inform their very own tales, protect their heritage and earn livelihoods from their creativity.
For Kyazze, storytelling is greater than a cultural pursuit.
It’s an business ready to be built–and a chance for Africans to form how the world understands the continent by changing into the first authors of their very own tales.