More than 4,000 people attended the latest Otamatsuri anime and manga convention in Nairobi, where Kenya’s anime and manga fans turned recycled materials, craft skills and imagination into elaborate cosplay costumes. The gathering pulled together people dressed as characters from One Piece, Naruto and Gachiakuta, and it did so without waiting for permission from any cultural gatekeeper. They made their own scene. They built it from scraps.
Who Made It Happen
Jotham Micah, co-founder of entertainment company Movie Jabber, said anime and manga have increasingly crossed cultural boundaries. He said, “I think the different sectors or cultural aspects of entertainment, the subcultures are key,” and added, “It gives people life, it gives people inspiration, and it's fun and entertaining.” That’s the language of a movement finding its own footing, not a ministry memo or a corporate rollout. The convention’s scale mattered too: more than 4,000 people showed up, turning what could have been a niche hobby into a crowded public assembly of self-made identity.
For many cosplayers, the work starts with what the system throws away. Julius Mokaya, a 34-year-old building caretaker and two-time winner of the convention’s costume competition, said he cannot afford to import expensive costumes and instead uses cardboard and other materials collected from recycling bins. His small apartment is filled with homemade weapons, masks and accessories. He spent months this year creating a costume inspired by Enjin, a character from Gachiakuta, a manga set partly in a world of discarded objects. Mokaya said, “The message of the story is that trash and things thrown out aren't really bad,” and added, “I'm broke half the time, but... I love the creative aspect, the deep dive into research and understanding the character.”
That’s the hierarchy in plain sight. Imported costumes cost money he doesn’t have, so he turns to recycling bins and cardboard. The culture survives because people at the bottom improvise.
What People Built Anyway
This year’s competition winner was 24-year-old Yvonne Chockey, who dressed as Angewomon, an angel character from a Japanese franchise. She used a hot-sand technique to heat and shape PVC pipes into a frame for eight large white wings, then cut each feather individually and attached it to the structure. Chockey said, “My next step is to keep crafting because I want to be maybe I cannot be perfect at crafting, but I want to get close, as close as I can to perfect.” The work sounds painstaking because it is. No polished institution handed it over. No official culture office assembled those wings.
Shalom Donga said the event gives her a rare opportunity to connect with people who enjoy the same culture. She said, “This event is special to me because I get to meet a lot of like-minded people,” and added, “I don't go out a lot, so I don't have the chance to meet people in person.” That’s the social function here: people making contact face to face, outside the usual isolation. The convention becomes a meeting ground, not a command structure.
What the Social Order Calls Strange
Mokaya said some relatives became concerned after seeing his costumes on social media. “Relatives saw what I was doing on social media and asked my father if I had joined a cult,” he said. That reaction says plenty about how quickly ordinary creativity gets policed by family suspicion and social fear. A costume becomes a threat. A hobby becomes a rumor.
For Kenya’s expanding anime community, the costumes represent craftsmanship, identity, friendship and a growing cultural movement that is increasingly finding its own space in the country. The people at Otamatsuri didn’t wait for approval from the top. They used recycled materials, time, skill and each other. In a city of 4,000-plus fans, that’s the real event: a culture made by the people who live it, not by the institutions that like to claim it after the fact.