HER | Story: wambui waweru on finding a new stride and story

Photograph by Eric Njobvu / 2024 NEWF Congress

Finding joy trekking up mountains.

Humanity has always used stories to explain and comprehend phenomena. Our brains are still wired to be more receptive to narrative structures as a means of sharing knowledge, comprehending facts, evoking emotion and creating meaning.

This is the Power of Story.

- Wambui Waweru, NEWF Story Lab Lead

In her element at the African Wildlife Foundation Headquarters in Nairobi where the ACVPL cohort gathered earlier this year. Photograph by Ariel Gakunga / African Wildlife Foundation

Wambui Waweru’s place with NEWF is easily not always easily defined. A tangle of creativity moving swiftly and slowly as at once, her role is to offer an inspired, value-aligned narrative structure to the NEWF Story Lab programs; to develop and refine curricula, and work closely with cohorts to develop stories, craft shooting scripts, offer insightful feedback and contribute to the collective learning that inevitably accompanies the marketing and distribution phase of films. 

But what positions this talented and poised Kenyan writer, voice artist and mother to harness a nuanced, almost delicate dance of navigating NEWF’s growing catalogue of African films, redefining the lens through which Africa is seen? It certainly is not hot, defining terms like frameworks and curricula.

A day after a Story Lab Q&A Hangout with fellows seeking to break into film, all of whom attended to engage with new story lab opportunities, she shares a reflective time code of her journey - one she issues with a warning that this will flow like an open stream of consciousness. Hearing Wambui speak is a decadent mix of calm and humble curiosity, effortless coolness and a hint that the story she has spent the most time teasing out, questioning, revisiting and repackaging throughout her life and career, has without a doubt been her own.

She starts by admitting that she had a moment during the virtual hangout with fellows and prospective applicants where she felt somewhat out of body considering the exact time and place she finds herself so deeply rooted and engaged with this work. She finds it strange - first and foremost - referring to herself as a filmmaker.

The word that I wear very well for me is writer, more so now I have come to a place where I am thinking of a writer being a storyteller. It is being able to observe situations and phenomena and get to a place of analysis - looking at them from different angles and communicating them in a way that can make them digestible to an audience. And that is what I learned in my formative years.

In high school, she had her head in novels instead of chemistry work, sharing how her first body of work was a series of handwritten stories crafted chapter by chapter with her best friend. These stories had her classmates clawing for more, so leaving High School where her earliest threads of identity were so nostalgically woven, she organically gravitated towards journalism school where she’d send stories to magazine editors in the hopes of a career in media. Her determination paid off when she was asked to come by the True Love East Africa office where after an exchange, she was perched at a desk in the corner tasked with a freelance writing assignment.

And avid runner and hiker, movement outdoors is one way she clears her head and regains perspective.

Embracing the lifestyle and health niche with True Love magazine, she went on to write for another glossy magazine, African Women. Her next role saw her pivot into writing parenting content for Baby and Moms, a helpful professional season since she was navigating new motherhood after the birth of her daughter (now 16).

The big one that really set my course as a writer especially, was becoming a senior staff writer for a magazine called Healthy Women. At the time, it was Dubai-based and I became an editor when we started side titles for men and children. This is where my course was set - I had to think more strategically and learn the business side of things since I was the bridge between the creative team and the management team based in Dubai.

Her life experience in her late twenties had her lifestyle writing gravitating towards answering a different kind of question than her earlier writing had been accustomed to answering. Research into statical aspects of deeper issues like statistic-based data in different countries, took her on a journey to writing a piece that has stuck with her called ‘The State of Kenyan Women’. When she left Healthy Women and started working for a newspaper, she found herself under the wing of a generous editor - the first to teach her about nuance. 

Challenging her to look beyond issues she was interested in from a topic perspective, she was learning to dig deeper. Instead of writing reporting for a news desk on a topic reporting on the nose, she leaned into her long, feature writing experience to explore the connections and stories beneath the surface; the factors weaving together happenstances and statics that landed on news desks with no time to unpack in-depth context in the way longer features were able to.

While digging far deeper than the surface of stories, she found herself in a new season of becoming.

A season of learning and unlearning in the Conservation Communication space.

Listening to underwater sounds off Cape Town's False Bay coast with Nature Through Her eyes.

What was the story beneath her surface?

Signing up for a marathon at a Kenyan Wildlife Conservancy right before COVID hit, she found herself bartering a story in exchange for a pass to run it, shortly leading to a shift into the communications industry which exposed her to the complexities and strategy that goes into conservation management.

Observing her place in nature and the industry, connecting foreign journalists and filmmakers with local communities who trusted her started leaning into feelings of uneasiness. While she was gaining invaluable insight into conservation, she was also becoming aware of truths that defined the lasting impacts of colonialism and the role she was playing in perpetuating narratives about African and African communities.

It’s fitting then that when I was first introduced to Rachel Wambui, I had no idea of the mental wilderness in which this dynamic, stoic woman had found herself. Attending Nature Through Her Eyes - she was listening, learning and challenging her place yet again. Where would her experience serve a purpose that aligned with who she had become and was still becoming?

Contributing on stage at APAC in 2022.

Speaking at the 2023 NEWF Congress.

I didn’t know where I was going. Why did I leave such a good job?
One thing my experience there gave me was knowledge about conservation management, reading articles about everything that’s happening in conservation across the continent, I have a frame of reference and insight to better understand that aspect. That blueprint has been really good for me but I needed to move on. The thing that fascinated me about NEWF was that when I listened to my first NEWF Congress, I looked around me and for the first time I was surrounded by people who understood where I was coming from.

More than anything, she was blown away by hearing the people around her saying everything she had been thinking. She had found a community of like-minded people who were boldly articulating concepts she had not yet found her language for. They were boldly leaning into truths that had shifted her career trajectory.

Rae Human from the NFVF Environment and Belonging Cohort in conversation with Wambui Waweru, Story Lab Lead for the NFVF partnership. Rae has been developing her film 'Kujichagulia', while pregnant with her first child. Photography by Lumka Mgilane / 2024 NEWF Fellows Summit and Congress.

Answering my question on how she came to leave Rachel in the past in favour of Wambui, she answers in a matter-of-fact way that speaks to the deepness of the comfort she has landed on when it comes to ideas of identity after 40.

People of my age and generation, and from where I come from grew up with Christianity and went to very British schools with gargoyles at the gate. That’s the high school I went to and we were taught to have pride and be proper. And it was a privilege to be in that school; to be honest, we were taught to aspire to whiteness and Western norms. For a lot of us - especially millennials - our rebellion has been dropping a lot of that.

We got to a point of questioning the idea of religion, matrimony, relationships and even education. I was reading a lot - history, colonialism, Wangari Maathai, African-American authors and as I was learning more about topics I wasn’t exposed to before, even about our names; and the more I read and pieced it together, I found it rubbed me up the wrong way. Then the other day I read some or other quote talking about how we write as an alternative to self-destruction. So, I got comfortable saying, ‘Please call me Wambui’. I see NEWF as a space for taking all of those things within our Zeitgeist - talking or laughing in the car because sometimes it’s just that, this community - to make films that express our stories in that way.

How do we have that radical shift in our narrative without experiencing that shift ourselves?

So while Wambui now has the headline confidence to say, ‘I go by Wambui’, her experience as the Story Labs Lead over the last few months has been about teasing out the stories that deserve to be told, and digging deeper to define her professional identity in a way that extends beyond writing to sit comfortably at ‘producer’.

This is the Power of Story.

A future where African storytellers seeking meaning beyond what is said about them, finding these stories written by and for African people - stories that are relatable, familiar, filled with hope, bravery and nuance. Stories that carry the courage to step into the wilderness and find the power of their own identities as African storytellers.