How many minutes until we say something like: why don’t we see such ingenuity when we choose to ‘copy’ foreign formats in this market?

The Real Househelps of Kawangware takes an American reality TV trope and gives it an authentic Kenyan narrative. Where Americans have The Real Housewives of Somewhere or the Other. The producers of this show flip the script and focus on something we are more familiar with – across the sub-sahara in fact.

Kawangware follows the lives of four house-helps (do ‘oyinbo’ even understand the concept of house-helps?); Awiti, Kwalekye, Njambi and Trufena as they live their lives and love-hate their shows in this Kenyan community. It shows on KTV on Wednesdays, and in Nigeria via DSTV’s Maisha Magic (Ch 161) on Tuesdays. 

It grew on us, ‘pole pole’. Actually, it didn’t: that was just an excuse for us to use the Kenyan expression for ‘slowly, slowly’.

But it is funny as hell.

Funny as hell. Especially the episodes with Kenyan comedian, Njugush (Timothy Kimani) who left the show in May, sadly, because – according to him – he didn’t like the creative direction. 

Still a good show sha. And you can catch episodes on the YouTube page here. 

Of course it isn’t new to television. It has been around since 2014.

But it is certainly new to our hearts.