Makmende Amerudi (Makmende is Back!). Poster Design – Jim Chuchu. Copyright, Just A Band, 2010. All rights reserved.

Makmende is a Kenya super hero. Or as it is said, he is your super heroes super hero. No one can touch him. The character has been created by the music group “Just a Band” for their track “Ha He” from their sophomore album.

The Makmende craze has taken over the internet with Twitter and Facebook alight with his exploits. You can follow the conversation below:

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What do you think of Makmende? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Super Heros to Fuel the Creative Economy in Africa.

Who doesn’t want to be a Super Hero? I know I do. At various times in my life I have dreamt about possessing super powers and in my days as a scientist working in an Oxford Laboratory genetically engineering viruses, I used to dream of Professor X…..the mentor of all mutants…the X-Men. Makmende touches that funny bone in many creative and curious people.

What I also love of this African Super Hero is that he is totally homegrown and his genesis is a demonstration of the power of converging technologies in East Africa. It is also a celebration of the community of innovators that is growing in Kenya, all feeding into a creative economy that really need to be recognised by the formal economy, nurtured and empowered to reach the global economy.

The creative industries that comprise the creative economy include: advertising, architecture, art and antiques market, crafts, design, fashion, film and video, music, performing arts, publishing, software, television and radio, and video and computer games. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the creative class represented almost one third of the workforce in the United States of America and the creative sector accounted for nearly half of all wage and salary income in the country, about US$1.7 trillion, as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined.

The convergence of telecommunications and multimedia has enabled creative content to be easily created and distributed to the widest numbers possible.

Since the late 1990s, creative industries have emerged as one of the most dynamic sectors in the global economy, with trade in related goods and services reaching $445.2 billion in 2005, up from $234.8 billion in 1996. Between 2000 and 2005, the trade grew at an average rate of 8.7 percent a year. Creative economy-related products, such as cameras, computers, broadcasting and audiovisual equipment, saw $274 billion in exports from developing countries alone in 2005.

Developed countries dominate the global market for creative products. In Europe as a whole, the creative economy is expanding 12 percent faster than the overall economy, according to a recent study prepared for the European Commission.

At the same time, exports from developing countries more than doubled between 1996 and 2005, from $55.9 billion to $136.2 billion, respectively, mainly on the strength of exports from China, the world’s leading exporter of creative goods, and strong gains elsewhere in Asia — India’s movies and software and South Korea’s digital animation products, for instance.

The picture was less positive in many other developing countries, particularly in Africa, whose trade of creative products as a whole commands only 0.4 percent of the world total of $424.4 billion. Africa recorded only a $1.7 billion mark in 2005, with design taking $829 million, publishing $480 million, arts and crafts $298 million.

James Shikwati, director of Inter Region Economic Network, a think tank in Nairobi, Kenya, laments these abysmal numbers. “In our quest to industrialize Africa, we have frowned upon art and thought we should all be scientists. In the process, we have started losing valuable aspects of our creative culture which we would ordinarily have used to launch ourselves to industrialization,” he wrote in Kenya’s Business Daily newspaper in April.

He pointed to countries like Malaysia and Singapore, where strategists are tapping into the world creative economy. “The point is, we have ignored our creative economy by erroneously viewing African music, art, design, games to be either evil, waste of time and uncivilized,” he wrote. “Elsewhere, people are making billions of dollars out of this because they have governments that are keen on promoting sound policies that not only protect art, but also make it easier for individuals to commercialize the same.”

Africa’s poverty is artificial, Shikwati concludes, because the continent is rich in culture and has simply failed to commercialize it.