“Create Your Own Opportunities”
When I got a letter offering me a place in arguably one of Kenya’s best high school for girls (yes, yes, #IWentToAlliance), my parents lost their collective minds. They were beside themselves. They truly had bright hopes and big dreams for me. I was going to be that child who would make them proud. Probably become a doctor or an engineer. Alas, it was in this academic institution that I discovered my creativity and passion for the arts.
Over 10 years later, in the outskirts of Lusaka, Zambia, I would be involved in a car accident. As these things often go, I would question my life and whether my career (which felt like one long, meaningless meander through my twenties) was my permanent lot in life. I would then quit my job and proceed to sufficiently piss my mother off.
“I want to become an actress!” I told her. I heard her inhale sharply over the phone.
To be a parent is a constant exercise in self-restraint. I could feel the incredulity and frustration in her voice. “An actress? Really? What do you mean you want to be an actress?” She asked, pushing back at what sounded to her like a very bad joke. I held my ground. She hung up the phone, absolutely livid. I could feel the heat through the phone line.
A week later, she turned up at my apartment and said to me, “So what is your strategy? I want to know your plan,” and a few days later, when I shared my plan with her, she asked a few questions, nodded silently, and since then has remained steadfast in her support.
Show business is a very, very difficult occupation. The lights, cameras, and glamor of the entertainment industry are deceptive. Behind the fancy gowns and well-pressed tuxedos is a ton of sacrifice, hard knocks and unglamorous work that goes into building an entertainment career. And yet, the odds of achieving even a small amount of success are slim to none.
The constant rejections I got during auditions were both gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. To be rejected over and over again and again because “you don’t look the part” or “you don’t fit the part” or “your accent is just not the right accent” or “you are just not good enough” does a number on your self-esteem and mental health.
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I quickly realized that the entertainment industry is to an amateur actress what the Olympics is to an amateur athlete. You have to be able to compete at an extremely high level. I had the desire and discipline to succeed but lacked the training or experience required. I was soon overwhelmed by my disadvantages.
I hit my lowest point when I called my mother in tears and sobbing and said, “No one wants to put me in their shows or movies.” I had no job, no money, and no prospects, and I wanted to quit. She listened to me keenly, her silence declining the invitation to my pity party. When I was done, she sighed and paused, searching for the right words. She then told me firmly and slowly, each word a complete sentence. “You. Will. Do. No Such. Thing.”
She then told me something in her naivete, and which I too, in my own naivete, believed her. She said to me, “If people don't want to put you in their TV shows, why don't you just make your own shows and put yourself in them?” To anyone else, this would have seemed like a preposterous idea, but in my desperate position, it was one of the most practical things I had ever heard. And that is how I returned home to Kenya and started my career as a creator and producer of film and television.
The 11 years that followed were arguably the most difficult of my life. It was one long, continuous, and seemingly endless lesson in character development. From subsisting on milk powder and sugar for weeks on end because I did not have money to buy food, to squatting with relatives and friends because I did not have money for rent, all whilst trying to peddle a TV idea that no one seemed interested in.
What had kept me going was my big, wild, and audacious dream to produce a TV show so I could star in it. As luck would have it, my determination paid off. One day I got a call from the National Broadcaster, who was interested in my television show idea and wanted to sign a contract with me to produce 13 episodes. I had no money except the equivalent of three dollars and fifty cents in my pocket, and I used it to take a bus to the broadcasting station to sign my first contract. I walked back home because I had no more money.
That is how, with only three dollars and fifty cents, my production company was born. I never did star in that TV show, and I never became an actress.
But that is a story for another day.