 My name is chief and it's no surprise with a name like chief. I can't be a bit of a wise ass and I myself confessed wise us indeed in case for helia wise us is We call them in jiu-jitsu and the reason why I Embrace the name jiu-jitsu is because it directly translates to being a knower somebody who's overly curious and it always struck me as bizarre that we vilified people who are knowers people who are curious and If you look at a lot of the folklore a lot of the fables that we have fed as children growing up, especially in the Swahili language I'm sure you're all familiar with the one as he is Kialamku Winzika good exact. Thank you. Now It's stuck me that I can't feed you statistics and Anacdos because I'm not an academic but as an artist it is my job to keep my ear out for the spirit of the Times for the zeitgeist and what I noticed was a lot of these folklore was established in the agrarian Age of our time when things didn't change very much and the custodians of the most knowledge were invariably older people and It made sense to be a conformist in such a setting now in the present age when we have Unprecedented youth unemployment when we have technological change that has never been seen before climate change and all these things that Our parents have no better clue about what the future looks like than we do so Conforming is the most stupid thing you can do in such a fast-changing environment now I I first I first came to the realization of how important it is to be a non-conformist in 2008 I always was but it really came home and a lot of people and all of analysts diagnosed What we went through in a myriad of different ways there were people like if you listen to Star Wars poem They looked at the tribal angle if you look at other people they look at the political angle land issues and whatever but the one thing that wasn't given about as much attention as I thought it should have been was conformity and I was reading the book of Philip Zimbardo is it who the the Lucifer effect which explores how even decent people can behave in appalling Ways if put under sufficient stress and now imagine how much worse people would behave if they already existing a culture which enforces Conformity so I felt I needed to do something about it and I thought that I would use the comic book format and what I did was go back in time and Decide to write about our history and I decided to write about the emergency period which had very uncomfortable parallels with what went through 2007 and doing this meant an incredible investment of my time an incredible Sacrifice I had to turn my back on a legal career. You can imagine how thrilled my father was at that So I knew nothing about creating comic books I knew nothing about what is involved, but I knew I wanted to do something irreverent I didn't want to to have my voice cluttered by any third party I did not accept any assistance from NGOs or third parties who would have not let my voice be pure Unfortunately, I learned that there's a price to purity. I run out of money after four issues so I Had to park the progress of my comic, but it gave me a valuable insight into what it takes to do something in a professional manner so I teamed up with a great writer who is a great friend Nahabi Wanderer and we syndicated a comic with a local daily and Now we we decided to tackle a more contemporary subject that a lot of more people could relate to and that wasn't confined to that space in time and the story we came up with was roba and roba is among other things a very agile fellow as you can see he Jumps and leaps off things rides motorcycles and whatever, but his greatest power is not all his physical prowess It's his ability to think critically. It's his it's his great talent with discerning his case kind of like a Sherlock Holmes from the street, you know, I mean so I Strongly believe that this is a sort of role model we need if we are going to have a continent full of young Richards like what you saw today people coming up with the innovative solutions to to help the continent innovative throughout of poverty we as artists have a very critical role to play in fostering a culture of not taking things for granted not taking things without evidence and challenging convention and we must follow in the tradition of people like fellow cootie if we are going to Earn the right to be mentioned in the same dress as them And I'd like to leave you with a quote from one of my favorite contrarians Who is the late Christopher Hitton's and it goes thus I I wouldn't risk quoting it verbatim The high ambition Therefore seems to be this That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with a maximum of skepticism The maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with a maximum of self-criticism This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than merely invoking or sloganizing it You'd have to say it's beautifully phrased and this is a beautiful encapsulation of everything that I stand for thank you