A Reflection on Kwathu: The World I am (Still) Building
LinkedIn did something new this year: it gave us a recap.
When I first saw it, my immediate reaction was that it was cheesy. It felt like LinkedIn learning from Spotify Wrapped, from Apple Music’s year in review, from everything else that’s become obsessed with summarizing us back to ourselves. I remember thinking, who actually needs this?
And then I clicked through it anyway. And I found myself pleasantly surprised. For one, I was surprised to find that the person I kept up the most with was Peter Zetterberg, who happens to be the manager of the Game Camp program within Xbox.
I joined LinkedIn in 2015. That data point alone startled me when I saw it.
Ten years is a long time to exist on a platform that people often reduce to networking, job hunting, or performance. For most of those early years, LinkedIn wasn’t intentional for me. I had an account. I updated it. I posted occasionally. It wasn’t a place I was actively building in.
That changed in 2021.
2021 and the Decision to Document
Between 2020 and 2022, a lot shifted in my life, and it seemed all at once.
I incorporated my company as a non-profit. My company received a $250,000 grant from the World Bank. I moved to the United States. My work started stretching more visibly across borders.
Before much of the formalization, my work existed in pieces, ideas, pilots, and a lot of unpaid labor. The grant was the first time an institution came in and said, we see this, and we are backing it.
Something clicked for me then.
I made a very conscious decision that I was going to document everything. Partly because I was trying to build a personal brand as a writer and an entrepreneur, but also because I realized how little we actually see of the process of building something.
We see success stories. We see failures summarized neatly. We rarely see the middle. The uncertainty. The constant falling off a cliff and realizing you survived, and then trying to explain how.
That’s what my blog, and eventually LinkedIn became for me.
I was stepping fully into entrepreneurship, into the abyss, again and again. Every time I landed on my feet, I felt this urgency to say, wait, you need to hear this part. This is what it took. This is how the system actually behaves when you are inside it. This is what the world looks like when you are trying to build something from the margins.
So I wrote. And I kept writing.
I often giggle at the idea that noone will read… but I keep writing for that one person that I know will read someday. It is for just that one person, that I write.
Before the Hub, There Was a Story
There’s a part of this journey that sits underneath everything else, and I don’t always name it.
After I wrote my first book, By the End of Your Teens, I knew almost immediately that I didn’t want my next creative work to be another book. I wanted to write a film. I wanted to write a musical. I wanted to build a world.
That world was called Kwathu.
The idea came from home. From memory. From a song I loved as a child called Kaphiri Ka Kwathu. It was nostalgic for me. My dad loved it. I grew up loving it. It carried a feeling of belonging that stayed with me long after childhood.
At the same time, I was deeply influenced by Sarafina! and how South Africa uses art, music, and film to hold collective memory. When I thought about history back then, I wasn’t thinking precolonial kingdoms yet. I was thinking about the Malawi I knew. The Cashgate scandal. Governance mishaps. The realities we were living through. I wanted to create something that captured the present moment so that future generations would have a cultural reference point the way South Africans do with Sarafina nad Apartheid.
That was the original Kwathu in my mind. A musical. A film. A story.
When Kwathu Became Physical
The World Bank came in with a different need. They wanted a hub. A physical space. Somewhere digital training, creativity, and innovation could live together.
I needed to name it.
By that point, the Kwathu universe was already forming in my head. So the space became the Kwathu Innovation and Creative Centre. It wasn’t just a building. It was home to me. The mother space. The place where everything else would eventually come from.
What I didn’t fully grasp at the time was how much brick and mortar would demand from me. Suddenly, creativity had to coexist with payroll. With sustainability questions. With monitoring and evaluation. With project management. With training curricula. With people depending on the work to survive.
The musical, in all of it, disappeared. It went quiet.
I moved fully into the business. Into making the work real and sustainable. Music4Malawi. Bants2Business. Creative platforms that kept the spirit alive while I learned how to hold an organization together.
I enrolled in my first Master’s Degree – trying to make sense of this tech world I was newly in.
Then, in 2022, I joined the UN.
Speeding Through Worlds
Looking back now, it feels like the universe has pushed me through multiple worlds at speed.
I love this the most: it gave me the story first. Then it forced me to learn everything that story would eventually require.
At the UN, I learned how international development actually works. I learned how systems behave at scale. I learned that Malawi’s story is part of something much larger, and that history, power, and institutions move slowly and deliberately.
Then I went back to school. A second master’s degree. More history. More systems thinking. More exposure to how seriously some countries take memory, governance, and continuity.
All of this was layering on top of the same original idea, even when it didn’t feel like it at the time.
Avatar, Franchises, and a Realization
Recently, I rewatched the Avatar films. All of them. Back to back. Including Fire and Ash recently a day before it launched.
I am still carrying the world with me days later.
What struck me wasn’t just the visuals or the story. It was the fandom. The depth of attachment. People don’t just like these films. They grew up inside this universe. It shaped how they imagine nature, conflict, technology, and belonging.
And I have found myself thinking, wait. We don’t really have this yet (as Africans).
Not a speculative world at that scale that African children can grow up with and feel belongs to them. Something imaginative. Something futuristic. Something that isn’t constantly framed through deficit or realism.
That’s when it became very clear to me that what I’m building is much closer to a franchise than a single product.
The game is a starting point. Not the destination.
I’ve been in media since 2013.
Blogging. Storytelling. Building a media company. Learning how audiences form emotional relationships with narratives.
Game development, knowing what I know now, isn’t a departure from that. It is a deeper layer. Perhaps the deepest. And eventually, I want to return to animation. To science fiction. To large-scale productions that take years and millions to make.
I think that this is how that road begins.
Speed, Time, and Giving Myself Grace
There are moments when I feel like I’m behind. When I look around and think I should be further along by now.
Then I started reading more about the producer of Avatar: James Cameron.
He had the core idea for Avatar in his late teens: the last 1970s. The technology didn’t exist yet. So he waited. The first film came out nearly three decades later in 2009.
That reframes everything for me.
I’m really only about five years into bringing the Kwathu universe to life in a tangible way. In that time, I’ve built a hub. Built teams. Pursued multiple business degrees. Worked inside global institutions. Entered entirely new industries. Learned what I didn’t know I needed to learn.
I’ve always known Kwathu is my life’s work. Accepting that it will take time has been grounding.
Games, Data, and an Unexpected Pivot
At that point, I was sitting at my desk and thinking about this farm world I was building. The innovation hub, the digital skills training, the idea of a smart innovation farm. And for the first time, a question came to me very plainly. What if we made a game about farming?
I remember saying it out loud to Alvaro. I said, what if we made a game about farming, would people even play it? And even as I said it, I wasn’t sure if it was genius or ridiculous. Alvaro laughed, and I laughed too, and for a moment I thought, okay, maybe that was a stupid thought. But it stayed with me.
So I went back to my computer and did what I always do when I’m unsure. I went into the data. Because I was working inside Xbox, I had access to performance data across games. I started looking up farming games. That’s when I discovered Farming Simulator more deeply. Then Stardew Valley. And I realized these games weren’t niche in the way I had assumed. They were making real money. Millions. Multi-million dollars. They had dedicated communities. Longevity.
That’s when the question shifted. This wasn’t about whether a farming game could work. It was about how.
So I started researching how people actually get into the gaming industry. I was already familiar with the Developer Acceleration Program, but I wanted something more hands-on. That’s when I came across Game Camp. I went online and saw that Game Camp Detroit was happening. And I remember thinking, wait, Detroit? That’s Michigan. That’s basically home.
So I applied.
A few weeks later, I got an email. I think it was from Chris or Peter. They said they’d seen my application for Game Camp Detroit and wanted to talk more about what I was trying to build. We set up a call. This was toward the end of my internship. And on that call, I explained everything. The innovation hub in Malawi. The gamification work we had been experimenting with. The fact that we hadn’t built a full game yet, but that we were ready to.
That’s when the conversation turned.
They said Detroit could work, but if I was serious about building in Africa, about bringing together African developers, then Game Camp Africa might actually be a better fit. And as soon as they said it, I knew they were right.
The People Who Made Space
One thing the LinkedIn recap surfaced quietly was people.
Leo B., the person who hired me into Xbox, has been a mentor in the truest sense of the word. Weekly conversations. Honest guidance. Time given generously.
Peter Z. has consistently made space. Through conversations, through support, through belief in what we’re building.
As we move into January, the Kwathu Kollective will begin operating as a studio within Game Camp Africa. Steven Khenai and Ekari Ngalawesa are leading development on the game. Watching this take shape has been one of the most affirming experiences of my career.
A New Year and a Shift in Curation
As the year ends, I can feel my curation changing again. I’m always experimenting. Always paying attention to what feels aligned for me and for the people who follow my work.
I know I won’t continue the LinkedIn newsletter in the same way. That experiment did what it needed to do. It introduced my work to new audiences. It created connection.
Going forward, the newsletter will live on my blog. That feels right. LinkedIn will remain a place to share, to signal, to connect. Not the archive.
I will continue documenting this journey. I have decided that this part will not change. It was, and still is, important to me.
Ten Years In
Ten years on LinkedIn is a strange milestone to mark. But I’m grateful.
Grateful for the audience. For the editors. For the community that has watched this evolve in real time. For a platform that held space for a story while it was still becoming itself.
The recap didn’t tell me anything new.
It just reminded me how long I’ve been building the same world, through different forms, across different spaces.
And I’m excited to keep going.
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If you’d like to go deeper into my journey — from Malawi, through the United Nations to Microsoft, you can find it in my books.
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