Thayù (they/them) is the eccentric and acceptably reclusive writer behind the mostly kind of fictional stories that will take you on an emotional rollercoaster. Their bio reads like an encyclopaedia: an award-winning creative powerhouse with a filmography portfolio of over 100 films and documentaries, and over 20 published works as an author. They are a visionary storyteller who fosters communities, both physical and virtual, by creating galleries, graphic novels, games, shoes, apparel, and furniture from abandoned buildings, and even friends’ backyards—anywhere their imagination can thrive. They are also committed to making the world a better place through their organization, Creatives Garage, which empowers creatives to pursue their dreams. Currently, they are coordinating a month of arts, culture, and heritage with the British Council and NBST, as well as taking their exhibition on GBV around Kenya.
1. Who is Thayù? I know, I know. That’s how they all start…
Thayu is a multidisciplinary creative who loves to play with all tools and gadgets they can play with.
2. When people use the words multidisciplinary and creative, for those outside the world, it can sound a bit ambiguous. How many disciplines are we talking? And what made you this tool and gadget person?
I always tell people that the only thing I can’t do is sing and play an instrument. My background is graphic design and film, and thankfully, because of being part of Creatives Garage – and my curiosity – I have been able to learn new skills along the way. Tools and gadgets…there I need an intervention! I buy gadgets all the time, just to play with them.
3. Your background is film? Where can we see your films?
At the local film kiosk (jokes!)…We have an online platform (www.kalabars.com) where most of the stuff I’ve worked on exists. I don’t focus as much on film as I’d love to, though. Mainly because I am a jack of all trades and a master of none, which is always better than a master of one (I hope everyone knows that’s how the whole saying actually goes!). Because of my love for storytelling in different formats, I get the privilege to create through other art forms such as comics, Augmented Reality, gaming, sculpting, events, theatre, and digital art.
4. What’s the last really cool gadget you got?
lol. A microphone. Yeah, yeah, I know, not fancy but I am so happy that I got round to getting a good simple microphone to use that didn’t need a whole sound department for quick jobs.
5. What discipline and project are you playing with right now?
Season Four of my podcast series, Blooms in the Dark, will be released in December. I am super excited about this. I also recently created an experimental participatory theatre, in which the main actor engages the audience, and then the audience directs the story. It’s a production that engaged and fused the audience, AI, tech, and traditional theatre together. It was called 2057 Dystopia, and was playing last week in Ngara. Now I’m planning my big closing out the year event, which is called Into Protopia; it’s like a smorgasbord of entertainment and AI to close out the arts, culture, and heritage month. We’ll have a lot of dop stuff going on, like a volumetric live capture concert (basically almost like a hologram) with a local artist and an AI one, an AI lab for kids, indie gaming, printmaking, and other cool things. It is on 12 th of December at Aspire Centre, Westlands, and let’s just say this is where we will get to fully geek out on creativity and tech. This one, enyewe, people have to see it to just understand how cool it is going to be!
I also have a multisensory exhibition called Maskan that delves into femicide in Kenya. The exhibition has so far toured in Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nakuru and is set to come back to Nairobi from 5-11th of December at the Alliance Française, in partnership with Usikimye, UN Women, and Alliance Française.
6. Tell me a little more about Maskan. What made you want to do this exhibition, and why did you choose Usikimye as your partner? What’s the idea behind the name?
So…My very good friend Njeri Migwi who runs Usikimye would meet up with me, and every time we met, she would end up in tears, because she would receive distressing images and messages of fresh femicide cases. Every time. Hysterically, she kept saying, ‘Thayũ, we need to do something.’ After a few of these meetings, I told her to hold my drink! And send me everything: stories, images, online comments…everything. I sat with this material for a few weeks and came up with Maskan.
Maskan means home, and was a fitting name for the exhibition, since most of these atrocities are either done at home or by people the victims once considered to be home.
7. You have a lot of events surrounding AI in these last two months of the year. What do you feel like is the creative and artistic future of AI in Kenya – is it a realistic hope that it will be positive, and not lean into the stealing jobs etc
trope?
Other than saying we probably all need to start working out to outrun the robots in the future (ha), I always say that we CANNOT fight AI, and live in a world of saying ‘AI is stealing our jobs.’ We must all just realise that maybe we should use these AI tools to our advantage. The reality on the ground is that yes, we should fear it. But what if we used these tools to make our workflow easier? I mean we do not have 400 million USD budgets to create mind-blowing car blasts (see what I did there?), but we can use a 20 USD monthly subscription to blow up a car using online Film and CGI tools – and still use that car to drive home after the shoot. My philosophy is to use AI authentically – meaning do not lose your artistic imagination and abilities – and ethically. AI for me is just another tool that can express my imagination.
8. How have people responded to Maskan? Where else did you take the exhibition? And will you do it again?
Wueh! The responses have been diverse emotions from anger to deep sadness. The exhibition I must say was emotionally draining for me and my team. In Nairobi, we showcased it twice at Creatives Garage and Baraza Media Lab during Sauti Sessions. We had maybe over 1500 people view it. Thanks to our partner Heinrich
Boell, we were able to take it to Nakuru, Kisumu and Mombasa. So during 16 Days Of Activism, Usikimye and Creatives Garage have partnered with Alliance Française and UN Women to showcase Maskan in Nairobi again (Nairobi people, this might be your last chance!). In 2026 we hope we can go to more counties.
9. What do you think is the main cause, in this country, that directly leads to GBV?
How the world has been set up, where negative patriarchal practices still exist, where people lack emotional intelligence to deal with stuff better? In a world where men still think that wives should be beaten and women think that violence is an acceptable way of showing love – a world where religion allows the violence, the police look the other way and enable families of perpetrators bribe their way out, giving more reasons for perpetrators to thrive?
This is an incredibly difficult question, because it is often a multipronged answer. But I did hear Martha Karua say something the other day, about how accountability is the first step – in terms of how we treat survivors and perpetrators, and how from the outside looking in, you would think it is the survivor, being mocked and retraumatized, who is the perpetrator.
Negative patriarchal practices are a factor, as you said in the question, for sure; but that is just one of many things. A failing police and policing system is another; fear of public and societal shame; religions that say that women should stay in violent and abusive marriages; it all comes together into a cocktail of certain death. If I were to pick one thing, it would be in the very name: GBV, gender. There is a problem with gender, and gendered power dynamics. You can call it sexism or patriarchy or entitlement or a male loneliness problem – the fact still remains, the imbalance or lack is stark.
10. Have you ever attended a Femicide march? What was that like? What jumped
out at you?
I have. I went for the 2024 March. It was very empowering. It felt like we actually had the power to stop GBV. Seeing how many people showed up for it was all the hope I ever needed to feel.
11. Queer people regularly experience GBV in this country, and it is sometimes
even harder for queer people to access care and support. Where would you recommend, or what inclusive and helpful resources do you know of?
I have met and heard of so many organizations that have come up to provide support. First of all in 2023, we (Creatives Garage) released a game called Saidia that works as a resource tool for providing all the information queer people especially may require to navigate these streets, from health care to legal counsel.
Organizations such as the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (NGLHRC), GALCK+ and INEND are doing a lot of amazing work to make Kenya a better place for queer people. Other organizations such as Usikimye also work with everyone, in an inclusive way, and have helped thousands of people without discrimination.
12. The AI dystopias and algorithms that we envision are often not ‘African’ – i.e. there is a definite stereotyping of what Africa looks like in the future, through perhaps a Hollywood lens, or a past lens that the Western world used to think to be true. What can be done to ‘Africafy’ the algorithm, authentically?
Isn’t it annoying when you play around with AI to change you in a picture and they end up giving you a Fiona from Shrek’s nose and curly hair? Most AI systems are not taught with African datasets, and sometimes I say it is a good thing for us, because they haven’t copied Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiongo’s writing yet! And so we still can’t have books that sound like them, told from the lens of another race. But also what that means is that we can hardly properly reference our communities. I think that African tech should be the ones to teach LLMs (Large Language Models) our ways and our culture. This way, some form of authenticity stays encoded, and our stories are told by us. Teaching these AI models is a great way of archiving our stories, and making sure our truths are not lost in history books.
13. Do you think some of these AI tools, which you speak of, can be useful in the fight against GBV? What do you think that would look like?
Yes. For example tools as simple as Chat GPT don’t (in most cases, depending on how the question has been framed) give answers related to violence. I believe Instagram and Facebook have Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques that enable AI tools to flag harmful content. Places like South Africa have Zuzi, a chatbot that anonymously collects evidence and stories from survivors.
14. In the spirit of imagining the future, what do you think the Kenya we want will look like, in 2057, like your play? For Kenyans, for women, for creatives?
Well, my play was mostly described by the audience as a lecture and a prophecy. The play was about telling people to stop what is going on now to help us have a protopic world in the future. It was about educating people on the suggested Loadshedding and the two data centres currently in development (the Olkaria Eco Cloud Centre and the Microsoft and G24 data centre campus, both being set up in Naivasha and targeting Geothermal energy). Do we even know what the repercussions are? Things like these need to be investigated and analysed to see their feasibility to our own survival. On the less grim side, creatives can build faster and scale their imaginations on a budget 😀
Operating on the ethos of a community reminiscent of a typical African village, Creatives Garage cultivates a thriving community and builds a robust ecosystem for artists to connect, learn, share ideas, collaborate, create new works, gain market access, and push boundaries. Over the past thirteen years, Creatives Garage has grown into a powerful multidisciplinary arts organization, supporting over 15,000 creatives across disciplines such as film, theatre, publishing, podcasting, photography, XR, music, and AI. The principle is that of a modern African village; collaborative, inclusive, and community-rooted, where creators connect, learn, co- create, and thrive. Through training, collaborative productions, and market access, we empower artists to grow creatively and economically, becoming active contributors to Kenya’s creative economy. From publishing books to producing podcasts, creating films, and exploring virtual worlds, we embrace both traditional and emerging technologies to push the boundaries of African storytelling. Our work sparks dialogue, challenges dominant narratives, and celebrates the richness and complexity of African cultures. Creatives Garage, centres radical creativity, cultural expression, and social impact, using art as a tool for empowerment, advocacy, and transformation.
Abigail Arunga is a writer, author (Akello, A Side of Raunch, The Mysteries of Jabali and Sauti, Siri ya Mwezi) editor, columnist, moderator, scriptwriter, social media manager, influencer, publicist, poet, copywriter, bookstore owner, quizmaster, podcaster, and MC. She’s passionate about the arts, pop culture, current affairs, and social justice. Abigail is invested in how to sleep more, anti-capitalism, virulent feminism, and good fiction. You can read her writing on the Daily Nation, Nation Online, Akoroko, Sinema Focus, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Goalkeepers Report), Debunk Media, Goethe Institut Kenya, as well as her own website, akello.co.ke. You can see her most recent screen work on Showmax, on Pepeta and 4Play, and on Maisha Makutano on Citizen TV. Her podcast, the Wadhii Podcast is on Spotify (under Africa Uncensored). Her first short film as writer/director, Bella Is Dying Maybe Next Week, debuted in Nairobi in February 2025. She was recently awarded the Best Scriptwriter (TV Drama) of 2025 at the 6th Women In Film Awards.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/abigailarunga