Magunga Williams doesn’t like being called a ‘content creator’. That not only does not define him, but it limits him. He prefers the term ‘storyteller’. And why not? His work cuts across various media: a writer, photographer, director, and now “dabbling in film work”. He isn’t calling himself a cinematographer, not yet, but he would not stop you if you did.
“I’ve always been a multidisciplinary artist. What some people may call content creation, but there is no art called content creation. People refer to content creation as an art, but they don’t interrogate what makes someone a content creator.”
It is somehow unsurprising. In a social media cauldron of hot takes and byte-sized content, he has developed an eye for the peculiar, like a modern-day philosopher’s guide to Buddhism. “I get my eye from looking around,” he says. “This is what informs my perspective on storytelling.”
Whatever its origins, the eye is well trained, for, in 2018, Magunga won the Creative Writing Blog Award at the BAKE Awards (Blogging Association of Kenya). He has been on storytelling for the past 15 years. “To still be a name that people mention over that time period because of my legacy of work is humbling.”
"To still be a name that people mention over that time period because of my legacy of work is humbling."
That iceberg of work involves some of Kenya’s cornerstone companies, like Safaricom, where he gives a nod to the late Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, who “not only loved art, but artists.”
Saying he doesn’t have a butchery or a kiosk somewhere, “this storytelling has to work.”
He quit law to pursue “this thing with my stubbornness, but it has to work out. It has to pay my bills.” It’s a bet he placed on himself, and if he has gone hungry, you can’t tell from the shimmer in his face or the clients banging down the door to work with him.
–Eddy Ashioya