Who is allowed to hold the camera?

27 Jul

100,000 shillings, or 5 years, or both.

Section 32 of the Films and Stage Plays Act doesn’t attach that penalty to a company, or to a director, or to whoever signed the budget. It names the producer. It names the proprietor. It names the promoter. It names the photographer. And then, having gone that far, it refuses to stop, and instead adds every other person engaged in the making of the film.

I’m a photographer. I have spent 14 years in rooms and compounds and back offices in this country with a camera, making work that was always intended to be seen by people beyond those who had commissioned it. Under section 4 of that Act, no film may be made in Kenya for public exhibition or sale, here or anywhere else, except under a filming licence.

Huh. Instinctively, I want to ask: What, exactly, is defined as a “film”?

Whether any particular thing I have made required a licence is the sort of question a lawyer would answer for a fee, and I’m not a lawyer. The line between a film for public exhibition and a piece of documentation that ended up on somebody's website isn’t one I can draw with confidence, nor am I going to pretend otherwise in a paragraph.

Still, in my non-lawyer reading of the Englishes, Section 10 permits “exemptions”.

This law seems to have a particular idea of how a film comes to exist.

Section 5 sets out what the application for a filming licence must ordinarily carry: A full description of the scenes in, and the full text of the spoken parts of, the entire film which is to be made. Not the film that was made. The film which is to be made.

There is a proviso. The licensing officer may accept an application without all of that, if the applicant supplies such other information as the officer may require. Some films genuinely are made the way section 5 imagines. There’s a script, a shot list, a schedule, a line producer whose entire function is to know on Sunday what will be said on Thursday.

But a considerable portion of my working life has been spent learning that some things are best documented when they occur in sit, and waiting for a sentence I didn’t know was coming.

You do the research. You ask the first question as well as you can construct it. And then a person who has had a camera pointed at them before gives you the answer they have learnt to give - the one that has worked, the one that got the last team out of the room satisfied, the one that they suspect you came for. That answer isn't a lie - it's a reasonable response to being asked, again, by somebody who will leave.

So you go back. And you go back again. And on the 6th visit, somebody mentions a cousin, almost in passing, in a clause that is not even the main clause of her sentence, and the film you thought you were making reorganises itself around the thing she has just said without meaning to say it.

You couldn't possibly have submitted that in advance. Nobody knew it was coming. Not you. Not her. Not anybody.

Unless you're God. Me, personally, I am not.

I want to head off the romantic reading here, because it's available and it's wrong. This isn't an argument that preparation is a failure of nerve, or that the unscripted is somehow more truthful than the scripted. Listening isn't the absence of method. It is a method, and an expensive one - it needs the research, the returns, the transport, the time, and enough humility to let what you find dismantle the frame you brought with you.

The reason to protect it isn't that it's romantic. The reason to protect it is that it's the only genuine way to make work where the person being documented has any power at all over what the documentation becomes.

If you arrive having already decided what the film must prove, you'll get a film. It might even be a good one. What you won't get is the thing she was going to say on that sixth visit or twelfth conversation - because you'll have stopped coming after the third.

Now, let's go back to the proviso.

The officer may accept other information. That's the door every evolving film in this country has to pass through. It isn't locked - as it currently stands. Nobody's forbidden - as it currently stands. The statute isn't a prohibition on unscripted work, and I'd be overstating my case if I said it were. What it does is quieter than prohibition, and considerably more durable. It establishes a default - the film with a settled script, whose scenes can be described and whose dialogue can be handed over - and then it makes that default the thing the law recognises without being asked.

Everything else has to present itself, explain its shape, and request accommodation.

The difference between those 2 positions is the difference between a right and a permission. I've come to feel this rather than merely think it. A right isn't remade every morning according to the temper of whoever's at the desk. A permission is. A right doesn't require you to be persuasive. A permission does - and it requires you to be persuasive on the officer's terms, in the officer's vocabulary, about a film you can't yet describe.

Now, I could tell you here that section 4 is a dead letter. That nobody enforces it. That the whole sector ignores it and it's just a colonial fossil nobody's bothered to scrape off.

It'd suit my argument nicely. It's also what I assumed.

It isn't true. And the way it isn't true is far more interesting than what I'd assumed.

August 2016. KFCB's then chief executive announces that a German broadcaster and the Sunday Times have violated the laws of Kenya, having filmed Kenya's athletics team manager in Eldoret without a section 4 licence.

24 May 2024. The Board sends 14-day ultimatums to a list of named people. Njugush. Jacky Vike. Eunice Mammito. Oga Obinna. Abel Mutua. Terence Creative. Get filming licences. And submit your videos to the Board for examination and classification before you put them up on YouTube.

Within days - after the people on that list objected, loudly, in public, joined by most of Kenyan Twitter - the Board's chairman revoked the notices and proposed stakeholder engagement instead.

4 March 2026. The Board opens a 90-day amnesty. Bring in anything you've made since 2018 and regularise it. Deadline: 4 June. After that, the notice says, unlicensed work faces a total blackout. No distribution. No broadcast. No public exhibition.

Three episodes of such episodes in the recent past. Not one prosecution. Based on a 64-year statute framing a criminal offence carrying 5 years.

That power isn't dormant. Nor is it docile.

What it is, however, is available. Which is a different condition entirely, and a far more useful one to whoever's holding it.

An offence enforced against everybody is expensive. It generates cases, cases generate judgments, and judgments narrow the offence. An offence that gets announced, aimed, and then quietly lowered when the target turns out to have 3 million followers costs nothing, and never gets tested at all.

In 2024, the Board found out exactly where the line was. It ran into people with audiences, and it stopped.

So the discretion is real. It's also weather-dependent.

Which means the question was never really whether you'll be prosecuted. Almost nobody is. The question is what it does to you to spend years working inside an offence that gets pointed at somebody every few years and then put down again. And the answer, in my case, is that I didn't think about it much at all.

I'm fairly certain that's the intended effect, rather than an escape from it.

And then there's that recent amnesty.

I keep turning that one over, because the obvious reading is that it's generous - and the obvious reading isn't wrong. Somebody at that Board was trying to bring a whole sector into compliance without ruining anyone in the process. Take the offer at face value.

Then ask what has to be true about a country for that offer to make any sense.

You don't invite an entire industry to regularise 8 years of its own output unless you already know that near-total non-compliance is the ordinary condition of that industry. The amnesty isn't evidence that the system works. It's the system's own accounting of how far it has drifted from the practice it governs.

Some people may have used it used it - I don’t know. Some have been paying the fees and filing through the portal for years. If the argument I'm making here is right, it isn't an argument that they were fools. It's an argument that the cost shouldn't have been theirs to carry.

You don't need a censor to run a censorship regime. You need an offence, a discretionary door, and a general understanding that both remain available.

I learnt about section 5 because Parliament is doing something to the Act, and that sent me back to the text.

The Films and Stage Plays (Amendment) Bill, 2026 proposes to abolish the Kenya Film Classification Board and hand its functions to the Cabinet Secretary and to licensing officers inside the responsible Ministry. If you've watched the Board this past decade, you'll know exactly why that news landed in a great many rooms as something close to relief. This is the body that banned Rafiki. That restricted I Am Samuel. That spent years running content regulation as a species of public moral instruction. I hold no brief for it whatsoever. I wouldn’t even think about crossing Thika Road at its busiest to save it.

And the Bill leaves sections 4 and 5 almost precisely where it found them.

The licence stays. The advance script stays. The proviso stays. The offence stays - along with its list of everybody engaged in the making of the film, and its 5 years, and its 100,000 shillings.

What changes is the letterhead of the office administering them.

We're being offered a reform of the askari at the entrance. The building is the same building, wired the same way, with the same understanding of who's expected to arrive and what they're meant to be carrying when they do.

I keep being told this is a technical Bill. That it's about institutional efficiency, about a parastatal that costs more than it returns. Perhaps.

But a law requiring you to describe a film before it exists isn't making a technical claim. It's making a claim about where a story comes from - that it exists, complete, in the mind of its maker, and that production is simply the business of going out to fetch the evidence.

That's a theory of authorship. It's also, if you follow it far enough, a theory of who the people in front of the camera are. Which is: illustrations of a conclusion somebody else already reached.

It’s a very audacious assumption. And a telling one at that.

I've spent my whole working life trying to work against that theory and such assumptions. Yet it's been sitting in a statute, anchored in law, this entire time. That a problem, folks. That’a big problem, especially in these times.

So before we argue about who should inherit the Board's powers, we might want to ask why making a film in this country requires prior permission at all - and what it's done to us in the last 60-odd years.

One more thing.

There's a date I can't stop looking at. I'm going to put it down without telling you what it means, because I genuinely don't know what it means.

The amnesty closed on 4 June.

The Bill was gazetted on 5 June.

Huh.

Postscript: Our position, filed.

The essay above is a personal opinion piece. What follows is not.
On 21 July 2026, Recentred Africa filed a memorandum with the Clerk of the National Assembly on the Films and Stage Plays (Amendment) Bill, 2026 - National Assembly Bill No. 32 of 2026, sponsored by the Leader of the Majority Party and referred, after First Reading, to the Departmental Committee on Communication, Information and Innovation.
The studio does not ask Parliament to save the Kenya Film Classification Board. It asks for three things, set out below.

Delete clause 13(c). On 23 January 2026 the Court of Appeal declared section 16(3) of the Act unconstitutional and void - the power to cut a film and retain the excised parts (Kahiu v Creative Economy Working Group & 6 others [2026] KECA 132). Clause 13(c) re-enacts that power in a licensing officer's hands. The Bill's own Memorandum of Objects and Reasons states that it "does not limit fundamental rights and freedoms." Both statements cannot stand. This is the single correction the Committee can make in one line, and it requires the House to do nothing more than honour a binding judgment of its own courts.
Do not move classification into the Ministry without independent review. The Bill hands classification, refusal and excision to an officer inside the responsible Ministry, with the appeal lying to that Ministry's Cabinet Secretary. It creates no independent merits appeal, no duty to give reasons, and no duty to publish decisions.
Replace Cap. 222 rather than re-staffing it. The production-licensing regime sits beneath this Bill untouched. A statute assented to in 1962, and commenced 10 weeks before independence, should not still be deciding who may make a film in a country that has had a Bill of Rights since 2010.

A note on how this was done: The Bill was gazetted for public participation on 9 July, with a deadline of 21 July. Twelve days, for 10 Bills, 2 of which restructure the institutional architecture of the creative sector. That window is itself a ground of objection, and it is raised in the memorandum.
Recentred Africa filed, then reviewed its own submission against the primary sources, and will publish corrections rather than passively ignoring them.
Memoranda go to the Clerk of the National Assembly at cna@parliament.go.ke, or to P.O. Box 41842-00100, Nairobi. The Committee has not yet concluded its consideration of the Bill.
The memorandum is available here.
Policy Desk, Recentred Africa

Marcus Olang'

Here’s the thing about stories: they’re everywhere. They’re in the way someone smiles, the way a community comes together, or even the way a brand tries to connect with its audience. And if you know how to listen, you’ll find that every story has the power to move people - to make them think, feel, or even act differently. That’s what I do.

I’m Marcus Olang’, and I help people and organizations tell their stories in ways that matter.

Over the years, I’ve worked in radio, copywriting, strategy, and photography. Each role taught me something new about how stories work - and more importantly, how they can create change.

Right now, I’m the Storythreading Lead at Recentred Africa , an organization incubated by Baraza Media Lab. At Recentred, we don’t just tell stories; we design them to influence behaviour. Think about it: when you hear a story that feels personal, that speaks to your own experiences, you’re more likely to listen - and maybe even change the way you think or act. That’s the power of storytelling, and it’s what I get to do every day.

Beyond my work at Recentred Africa, I run Stills By Marcus, where I use photography to freeze moments in time and remind us of what it means to be human. So when I’m not behind the camera, or reflecting upon what it means to be a human living in Africa, you’ll probably find me nose-deep in a late-night photo-editing marathon.