Andrew Kaggia
Andrew Kaggia is a self-taught Kenyan 3-D animator, game developer, and digital storyteller whose work has pushed East African entertainment onto the global stage. He taught himself Blender and Unity in his teens, releasing the viral short Wageuzi: Battle 2012, a satirical mech-combat film featuring Kenyan politicians, that won Best Animation at the 2013 Kalasha Awards and screened at the Durban International Film Festival.
In 2015 Kaggia created Nairobi X, Africa’s first full-3-D first-person shooter, where players defend the capital from an alien invasion. The game topped Google Play charts in Kenya and drew coverage from CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera, sparking a wave of home-grown game studios. To accelerate that momentum he founded Afrikana Digital in 2017, producing everything from AR filters to cinematic trailers for clients such as Safaricom, Netflix, and the Africa CDC.
Kaggia’s personal YouTube channel Heroes Smashers, a mash-up animation series where Marvel, anime, and African superheroes collide, has surpassed 400 million views and is closing in on one million subscribers, placing it among Kenya’s most-watched channels. Beyond the screen he mentors young creatives through the Kuza Koding boot camp, lectures part-time on real-time rendering at Jomo Kenyatta University, and advocates for stronger intellectual-property protection to nurture Africa’s digital-media economy.