Nana Kagga is a genius! The actor and film-maker has starred in, and also created a number of blockbuster film productions all the way from Hollywood to Uganda. She’s also a 42-year-old mother-of-two, who somehow never manages to look 42, at all! In honour of her first Satisfashion UG cover, we combed through her story (which you can read here) for life lessons, we believe you and I need.
Here we go.
Tell your story, it’s your truth
I believe that everything we do in life is a story, something that should be captured. If you are fortunate enough to give the voiceless a voice, then you should. I think that you can have brilliant scientists, lawyers, bankers, but the ability to bring the intangible to life, to put a feeling to something, to tell a story and bring it to life is a gift that a lot of people will never have. If you have that, it’s something that you do not choose, it chooses you.
Ugandans are scared of extraordinary things (ooops)
I think Ugandans are scared of anything that could possibly be extraordinary or different. We are scared of individuals who dream outside the box, people who don’t reflect us, that are not married with 3 kids, that don’t live in Naguru or Naalya. We are scared when people chart their own paths, when someone says, “this is me”! There’s a lot of us like that, who want to break barriers and tell stories and it’s a story that needs to be told. We are not all moulded in one way, I think when we embrace the different, we scare ourselves. We like to ostracise people who are different.
The sad life of female scientists
The belief is – If you are a scientist you must now become a he-she. You find a lot of women scientists who, no offence, wear a lot of pants and shirts trying to blend in because they have been told that the only way they can be taken seriously is if you have no makeup. But I was always born as Nana, I don’t know how to blend into the background. It’s not in me, I will never learn, because I feel like my fire burns too bright and you can either love me or hate me. There’s never going to be an in-between.
If you commit to do something, go for the jugular
The friends I have, I have kept for years because they understand me. There are days where I’m Mother Theresa, and days where I’m a breathing dragon, as in, I won’t tolerate mediocrity – if you commit to do something, go for the jugular. I hold myself accountable, if I’m going to do film, I’m going to break the barriers, by the time I’m done with this industry, we need to be on Netflix, people need to be coming here trying to partner with us as opposed to us begging cup in hand for them to hear us. By the time this film industry is done, we need to own our stories, to rewrite our history, not from the colonial perspective, but we will rewrite it through our films, so our children can see who we really were and are. We are not second class citizens, we are not just black people.
Africa gave the world civilisation
We gave the world civilisation, so why are we selling ourselves short every single day, hoping that the white man will play saviour and come to tell our stories for us? When we get things like Black Panther which, by the way, I appreciated; but then again it was watered down to cater to white people’s palette as well. To me, the Black Panther should have been morphing into the panther that we were told about as children, running really fast and tearing apart villages. Not these things of him just wearing a suit. I just felt like yeah, I liked the idea of seeing ourselves at that, but… What did we do?
We need to take back our power
We flocked the cinemas in our bitenge and filled them up, while they were making the buck. Just because people felt represented, and there were people who talked about how they watched the movie 10 times. It worked! We were thinking “We are taking back our power,” while in the offices, they are making the money. We can only take back our power if we to tell our stories. People like Tyler Perry rise to success after success because they are telling black stories that even you need to consume.
If the marriage isn’t working, walk away
I do not subscribe to the idea that if the marriage isn’t working, you should stay for the kids.
Acting is a very powerful tool
Acting is sometimes about referring to the pain you have suffered, pulling the ugly out and bringing it to life. A lot of people are uncomfortable to get in touch with the trauma they have suffered, or even the joys. They are powerful tools.
Right from when I was a child, I was different from my siblings, and from everyone around me. When you recognise that as a person you don’t fit, you start to realise that everything about you makes people uncomfortable.
I realised that looking for people to accept or love you is a complete waste of time, that one I actually understood when I was about 22. Even the parents who give birth to you will never understand certain facets of you. They don’t even want to understand it, however much you try to explain. Never try to be what anyone else wants you to be, ever! Learn that! You will pass through life happy, while laughing your way through. Society has a way of killing each one of us off systematically, and if they don’t understand you, they have to label you something.
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