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i know nothing.

I should probably tell you what I do.

That's what a personal website is for, apparently. It's supposed to take a person who's spent years becoming several things at once and return a clean sentence before the visitor loses interest. Writer. Photographer. Story Lead. Nairobi. There. The internet may continue.

I could give you the longer, more “polished”, more LinkedIn-ready answer.

“One practice in three registers. Curiosity begins the work; attention decides the form.”

Technically accurate. Also the kind of sentence that's very comfortable on its own slide on a deck.

The less efficient answer, however, begins with books.

I grew up surrounded by them. This didn't make me wise, which is fortunate because wise children are unbearable. It made me curious about a particular kind of impossible thing.

Letters are marks. Words are arrangements of those marks. Put enough of them beside each other with sufficient attention, and suddenly there's music in a room where nobody has an instrument in their hands - other than, perhaps, a pen and paper or a keyboard. Not in the air, either. The room remains silent. The music happens in another person's mind.

I found that enchanting. Sorcery, really, although writing has since acquired enough invoices, deadlines, and tracked changes to damage the illusion.

Still. Every so often a sentence turns at precisely the right place and the old magic returns.

The trouble with words is that they don't only make music. They make categories. Contracts. Borders. Briefs. Official accounts. They decide who sounds educated, who sounds credible, who sounds human, and who must first translate themselves into somebody else's idea of clarity.

This is the part where enchantment acquires paperwork.

Someone else made that music in my mind first. Books taught me the marks, the words, and the arrangement; curiosity made me want to understand the trick. I write because I still enjoy making that magic happen in my own mind - and because, every so often, the arrangement carries it into somebody else's.

And I keep writing because I don't trust the people who insist there's only one respectable arrangement, one credible music, one acceptable way for that world to sound.

There are other questions.

What does grief ask of a person after the condolences become less frequent? Why is cultural work celebrated in public and starved in private? What does professionalism require people to armour, flatten, or leave outside the room? And how does an event beginning on time become an argument about whether an entire creative infrastructure is possible?

On a bookshelf, these subjects sit far apart. Under pressure, they keep opening into the same questions: who gets named, who gets believed, who gets paid, and who gets left carrying the consequence?

I usually arrive through something ordinary. It sits still for long enough to look natural. I become annoying about it. Then it opens. There's almost always a system inside.

Photography began with light doing what light does whether anybody is paying attention or not.

Striking a wall. Cutting a face in two. Stretching the shadow of an ordinary thing until it becomes briefly enormous. Catching a person's eye at the exact angle that places one sharp fleck of life inside it.

The camera gives me a reason to keep looking. It always does.

A Nairobi street with matatus, pedestrians, roadside trees and buildings under a pale sky
P01Nairobi, street study.

The camera also gives me the moment after.

Somebody sees a portrait of themselves. Their face changes before they've decided what to say. Then: “Oh, wow! That's me!”

Yes. It was you the whole time.

But recognition isn't a small thing. There are people who've been photographed all their lives and never encountered themselves in an image. There are people whose images have travelled farther than their own account of who they are. There are people who've been made visible in every way except the one that returns authority to them.

The frame isn't innocent. It never is.

I've been photographing since 2012. Long enough to know that timing isn't merely pressing the shutter at the impressive fraction of a second. It begins before the photograph, in whether a person trusts the room, and continues after it, in where the image travels, what the caption claims, and who gets to decide that the picture is finished.

None of this makes photography less enchanting. If anything, it makes the enchantment evermore prescient.

A woman in a red top and patterned headscarf, with white face paint, looks down and smiles
P02Portrait study.

Human behaviour arrived by another route. Then it rearranged the map.

Doing one thing changes what another person is willing to do. A message moves through a group and returns as action, resistance, permission, performance, memory, or something nobody put in the strategy deck. A person being listened to changes what an argument is able to become.

Listening is a lost craft. Which is a strange thing to say in a world where everybody appears to own a podcast microphone, but owning equipment and being available to another person's account are different disciplines.

The act of listening changes the listener too. Or it should. If the research returns exactly the strategy that entered the room, the room may have been décor.

I find human behaviour endlessly fascinating.

I also know fascination can be dangerous in the hands of a professional.

Curiosity has excellent public relations. It sounds open. Generous. Almost harmless. It can still enter somebody else's life, ask them to explain it, convert their knowledge into a deliverable, and leave with the cleanest version of the story.

So I don't mean that the world becomes knowable when I look at it.

I mean that looking should make me less certain of my right to the first account. In the best way possible.

Other people's lives aren't raw material.

C01 / shared consequence

Najali

Commissioned by hive / WRTHY, I curated men's focus discussions and episode content, and supported broadcaster and influencer coordination.

Eight focus discussions in Kibera and Mathare changed the series' language, themes, settings, casting, conversational architecture, practical prompts, and distribution logic.

The important fact isn't that research happened.

The public form changed because people spoke.

read the shared case at Recentred Africa

This is where the things I do stop being three interests and begin interfering with one another.

Writing teaches the photograph to distrust the edge of its frame, while photography makes an abstract argument account for the body standing inside it. Behaviour change work asks the beautiful sentence what happens after it's been admired; radio asks whether any of it reaches a living person.

For years, I mistook that conversation for an argument.

Then it occurred to me - and, apparently, to the instruments themselves - that none of them was competing with the others. They were parts of an increasingly rich whole.

W02 / grief and memory

I just realised that adulthood is a never-ending exercise in grief management.

Three RIP posts before morning tea. Then a father, a school uniform, and the work that continues after language runs out.

read at this man's mind
A roofed structure stands in flood water between bare trees at Lake Nakuru
P03Lake Nakuru, after the water rose.

There is a version of a professional life that reads as a series of promotions towards the person one was always meant to become.

Mine has been less... obedient.

Operations taught me that traceability matters because somebody will eventually depend on the thing everybody else regarded as admin.

Trust communications placed those systems beside patients, partners, volunteers, and a public with no obligation to admire the filing system.

Breakfast radio taught me timing, address, and the peculiar intimacy of speaking to one person while everybody else listens.

Promotions taught me what happens after the clever idea leaves the studio and meets weather, budgets, logistics, and actual human beings.

Agency strategy taught research, positioning, and execution. Behaviour change work made the stakes less theoretical. Photography made attention physical. Independent practice allowed the instruments to begin talking to one another. Recentred made the method shared.

None of these is a pivot. It's more of a... compounding accumulation.

Curiosity kept opening the next door. Attention carried what it found through. The dates are only the footprints.

I know nothing.

Good. It keeps curiosity alive and attention honest.

Some things deserve a longer question. Some survive it. Some don't.

Professionalism isn't the absence of personality. Neutrality isn't the same thing as fairness. A flattering number isn't evidence of change. Visibility isn't authority. Listening that can't alter the plan is theatre. A photograph doesn't become ethical because the light was beautiful. A sentence doesn't become true because it moved you.

And curiosity isn't a destination.

The point of following a question is eventually to become responsible for an answer.

So. What do I do?

I write. I photograph. I work with people to understand how stories move, what they permit, and what they change.

The short answer was available from the beginning.

The longer one is the more interesting path. The adventure is the point.

i know nothing.

And then I look again.