From screen life to Lamu: A creator’s journey

Umazi Mvurya had had enough. Creating on a computer screen was getting her down and she was looking for something a lot more “real”.

“I was in front of my computer and I was working on some things that were art-related but were not the act of creating that art,” she recalls. “And I just felt like… I just need to be waking up every day and working with my hands.”

The digital artist and videographer started looking for training that could redirect her creativity.

Mvurya is from Kenya’s coast and identifies as Duruma, an indigenous Bantu group. When she started looking for a place to study, a mainstream art school didn’t seem suitable.

“My spirit was not feeling a Western style of art,” she says. “And then something in my spirit was like, ‘why don’t you just do wood carving in Lamu?’”

She packed her bags.

“I didn’t think twice. Came here blind, found my teachers on the ground, and took it from there.”

Lamu still uses wood in everyday life. Its small alleyways connect coral-stone buildings, shaded courtyards, and beautifully carved wooden doors. Dhows travel the passage surrounding the island, while workshops in the Old Town continue to rely on skills passed down from generation to generation.

The island’s woodworking tradition has always entailed more than just shaping a material; it requires an understanding of grain, geometry, patterns, and tools, most passed down through experience.

The town has been inhabited for over 700 years and is listed by UNESCO as one of the best-preserved Swahili communities in East Africa. So for Mvurya, learning the craft meant entering an age-old tradition, while figuring her own pathway.

Having worked in video production, creative direction, set design, fashion, and visual art, Mvurya had an idea of what could work visually. Yet she had always been drawn to creating things she could touch, even if that meant spending more time creating props and building sets.

Lamu became more than just a place to master a technique. She began learning to work with materials that were already part of an area’s unique cultural and social heritage.

One of her teachers, known simply as Almasi, claimed to be Kenya’s only traditional Swahili woman woodcarving teacher in Lamu Island – something that is also mentioned in the town’s tourism ads. Mvurya felt a deep connection.

Another of Mvurya’s teachers, Ali Abdi Hamza, known in Lamu simply as ‘Alibaba’, believes that teaching the next generation is critical to the craft’s survival.

“It is crucial for them to learn because hands-on work never fails you,” he says. “We are eager to pass down this talent to the youth because we refuse to let it vanish from Lamu.”

“Personally, I love a student who comes forward directly and says, ‘Teach me the trade,’” Ali said. “It gives me the drive to instruct them.”

For Mvurya, Lamu’s famous doors are one of the clearest ways of understanding the relationship between wood, identity and history in Lamu.

“If you’ve had a chance to walk through Lamu, you can see the Swahili doors, the architecture, and how they decorate the beds,” Mvurya says. “Each of these motifs actually have a story.”

Historically, elaborate doors could suggest wealth and status of the homes behind them. Lamu doors with floral, geometric, and calligraphic themes are documented in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the doors served as vital marks of the houses they guarded.

Dhow-making, too, relies on knowledge passed down via generations of woodworkers. For generations, boats have been utilized throughout East Africa’s coast for fishing, transportation, and trade.

For Mvurya, that makes wood more than a material.

“Swahili wood carving is an indigenous East African art,” she says. “We put all these Western styles of art on pedestals. I want to challenge that.”

Her desire to study the trade also placed her in the broader African creative economy, which is increasingly being considered not only in terms of culture, but also skills and livelihoods.

UNESCO’s 2026 report on employment in cultural and creative industries emphasizes the significance of skill development while highlighting persisting issues such as informality, poor wages, and gender imbalances in the industry.

Mvurya is learning the skill in a culture that is still heavily male-dominated, but the experience has challenged more than just her beliefs about who may practice it. Working with wood has also impacted how she perceives intelligence.

“It has humbled me because the technical side is all math,” she says. “If you do not understand math, your angles, and your proportions, you’re not going to be able to do wood carving.”

She had always been attracted to geometric shapes, patterns, and repetition. Now those interests have somewhere physical to go.

At a workshop in Lamu, veteran carver Mbarak Mohamed Saleh revealed another aspect of the process: the timber itself.

Traditionally, Lamu’s wood carvings and furniture have been made from hardwoods such as mvule (or African teak, Milicia excelsa) and mbambakofi (Afzelia quanzensis). This has become an issue for Mvurya, who is conscious of efforts to preserve Kenya’s remaining hardwoods.

She uses scrap timber and offcuts whenever possible and has pledged a portion of her profits to conservation efforts around Kaya Mtswakara, a sacred forest and ancestral site of Kenya’s Miikenda people.

The connection is important, she explained

The sacred Mijikenda Kaya forests are a network of woodland locations on Kenya’s coast that are conserved through traditional knowledge systems and elder councils. UNESCO regards the Kayas as significant stores of Mijikenda cultural customs and knowledge.

For Mvurya the relationship between culture, identity, and public life is something she understood long before she began wood carving.

She studied both Politics and Law and Society at Oberlin College while also developing the I AM KENYAN campaign, a social-media project launched in advance of Kenya’s 2013 elections. The initiative accumulated over 21,000 pictures, earning her widespread recognition, including from the BBC.

Mvurya increasingly identifies herself as an intermediary between elders, institutions, and possible partners in the area.

In 2015, Oberlin announced that Mvurya had been accepted into the Stanford Africa MBA Fellowship Program.

Today, sitting with a piece of timber, the pace is different. There are no keyboard shortcuts. A shape must be understood before it can be cut. The hand must learn how the grain moves, how much pressure a tool requires, and how a minor angle change can affect the final shape.

In Lamu, the process starts with the material.

Written by Koffi Iranyibutse