Kizito Ahams joined the call from Geneva, Switzerland. He had just come off a full day of meetings at a conference exploring the intersection of AI and the creative economy, agriculture, education, music, all of it. He was tired. He was also, unmistakably, still thinking.
That combination, exhaustion and intellectual restlessness, turned out to be exactly the right entry point for a conversation about what it actually takes to build something like Afrocroiser from the ground up.
Kizito is Mavin’s Senior Manager, Licensing and Publishing – and the person who conceived the idea for the camp nearly two years before the documentary dropped. By his own admission, he is not the person you see in the front of the frame. But without him, there is no frame.
I caught up with him the evening after a long travel day.
You mentioned the idea for this camp started about two years ago. How did it actually come together?
“I had early interactions with some of the leaders at SACEM a little under three years ago. I was invited for a speaking engagement, and they happened to be in the same territory. After the speaking engagement, we struck up a conversation and built a relationship. We just knew that we had to do something together. SACEM is the oldest performance rights organisation in the world, and, given their excitement about what is going on in Africa and Mavin, I figured there must be common ground for us to do business together. But you
