Chief Nyamweya
Chief Nyamweya is a Kenyan writer-illustrator whose inky, high-contrast panels dubbed “Kenya-Noir”, blend hardboiled aesthetics with African history and civic themes. Entirely self-taught, he broke out in 2010 with the newspaper strip Roba, followed by the award-winning graphic novella Emergency, a noir retelling of Kenya’s Mau Mau era.
In 2013 he co-founded The Tsunami Studio, a Nairobi VFX, animation, and music house that clinched AITEC Africa’s Best Film & Content Developer Award the same year. The studio has since delivered title sequences for Netflix’s Country Queen and Afro-futurist concept art for Lupita Nyong’o’s forthcoming feature The Garden of Heaven.
Passionate about learning, Nyamweya founded Freehand Movement in 2018 to publish interactive comics that pair printed pages with augmented-reality overlays accessed via smartphone. The flagship series Art of Unlearning turns STEM topics into animated lessons and is now used in 120 Kenyan secondary schools through a partnership with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development. A 2024 pilot with UNICEF is localising the content for Swahili and Somali speakers in refugee classrooms.
Named to Business Daily’s Top 40 Under 40 creatives (2022), Nyamweya lectures on visual storytelling at the University of Nairobi and mentors artists at the NAICCON Comic Creators’ Lab—proving that ink, code, and imagination can reshape how Africa learns its past and designs its future.