Kenya
Impressions from Nairobi

An emphasis on teamwork. The AFRICOMICS workshop in Nairobi, Kenya was a success thanks to the 12 participants made up of writers, filmmakers, illustrators with 2 hailing from Uganda. The workshop was led by the Kenyan-German trainer team of Birgit Weyhe and James Kamawira. The mutual support of the facilitators and participants just as the intensive networking among the participants proved enriching and productive as teams were formed to create the comics.

The workshop facilitators

© James Kamawira James Kamawira is an accomplished and experienced communications expert. He specializes in Graphic Design, 2D and 3D animation and illustrations with his primary interest being illustrations and comic/narrative development. He began his professional career as a trainee graphic artist with Central Arts Promotion in Nairobi and learned the trade on the job from 1985- 87 before joining the advertising firm Hill Ayton (now Ayton Young and Rubicam) as a finished artist. In 1988 he moved on to Kenya Times as Political Cartoonist where he worked up to 1994 before moving on to the East African Chronicle in the same capacity up to 1997. He then joined the Standard Group and was the newspaper’s Political/ Editorial Cartoonist up to 2013. In 1992 he was awarded a scholarship at the School of Electronic Art, San Francisco, California, USA, by USAID in it’s Training for Development program. While in the USA he was able to interact with his American counterparts and contributed to the Detroit Free Press and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2005 he attained an Advanced Diploma in 2D and 3D Animation and Multimedia Studies at the Shang Tao Multimedia College in Nairobi. He served as an Art Director at Communicating Artists, a company that specialized in Publishing, Radio, TV and Print advertising, Animation, Graphic design, Illustrations and Comic development between 2000 and 2014. Mr. Kamawira is a published artist with a number of comic titles under his belt. These include “Bongoman in the Gulf” 1995, “Kham in Khamland” 1995, “The Ozone Story UNEP” 2002, “PATH The Border book” II and III. Mr. Kamawira is one of the principle artists involved in the world acclaimed POPED series, an annual graphic narrative on reproductive health funded by the UNFPA, which run from 1999 to 2013. He is also the creator of popular cartoon strip Bongoman that runs every day in the Standard Newspaper and children’s strip Babu that runs in the same newspaper every Sunday.
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© Vera Drebusch Birgit Weyhe was born in Munich in 1969. She spent her childhood in East Africa and studied literature and history in Constance and Hamburg. In 1997 she obtained her Magister Artium. After studying illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, she has worked as a freelance illustrator and comic artist in Hamburg. Her graphic novels have been nominated for several awards in Germany, France and Japan and her comic "Madgermanes" received the Bertholt Leibinger Stiftung Comic Book Award in 2015 and the Max-und-Moritz-Preis as best German-language comic in 2016. From 2017 to 2019, she published a monthly comic series "Lebenslinien" in Berlin's "Tagesspiegel." Weyhe's work has been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad and has been published in a wide variety of international magazines and anthologies. On behalf of the Goethe-Institut, she has given workshops in numerous countries and participated in an artist exchange in Sao Paulo and Helsinki. Since 2012, she has taught as a guest lecturer at various German and US-American universities.
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