Tendo Nagenda: High-profile film executive in Hollywood 

Few Ugandans had ever heard of Tendo Nagenda before the film Queen of Katwe came out in 2016. The biographical film told the story of a Ugandan girl, Phiona Mutesi, who lived in Katwe slum in Kampala, and by sheer luck learnt how to play chess. 

As it turned out, extreme poverty did not stop her from being very good at this game of brains and class. At 14, the uneducated young girl from Kampala’s underbelly had risen through the national and continental championships to become a Woman Candidate Master after winning at the 39th World Chess Olympiads in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia.

That film, as inspiring as it is, may never have been made had it not caught the attention of a film executive in Hollywood that happened to be Ugandan. Tendo Nagenda was the executive vice president of production at Walt Disney Studios when he first got wind of the incredible story from back home. 

Queen of Katwe
Nagenda narrates the story of how he first bumped into the Queen of Katwe story. “This story came to me from colleagues at ESPN Films, which is owned by Disney. We were talking about movie ideas, and they had read an article that was coming out in ESPN magazine in a few months. They passed the story to me not knowing that I was Ugandan…”
The story resonated with Nagenda in more ways than one. “One was my personal relationship to it. I moved to Uganda when I was 12 years old. Phiona Mutesi is about 11 years old when our movie starts, so I related to that. 

“It was set in Uganda, and I don’t think we’ve seen enough positive stories come out of that country. We’ve seen movies about Idi Amin like Last King of Scotland. Mira Nair made Mississippi Masala, which is about a family that was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. So we’ve seen interesting, good stories, but we haven’t seen this story.”
For this and other reasons that he talks at length about, Nagenda started developing the story almost immediately. That was 2012.

Two years into the development, he contacted Mira Nair, a Ugandan-Indian filmmaker in Hollywood and wife to Ugandan-Indian scholar Mahmood Mamdani to come on board. Nair not only had a home in Uganda, she had also done a few films here. She understood the dynamics of such a project. And just like that, the dominoes started falling. What followed after is the highly acclaimed film that put Uganda on the map, this time for noble reasons.

Black Panther
Two years later, in January 2018, the global blockbuster superhero film, Black Panther, was released. In one of the interviews with The New York Times, the film’s director Ryan Coogler said, “What I’ll say is, this is my second time working in the studio system, and they say it’s the studio system, but it’s really the people system. It’s who’s running the studio? How are they running it? When you look at Disney with Tendo Nagenda, executive vice president for production at Walt Disney Studios… it’s a place that’s interested in representation, not just for the sake of representation, but representation because that’s what works, that’s what’s going to make quality stuff that the world is going to embrace, that’s what leads to success.”

Nagenda didn’t work on Black Panther directly. But since the film was distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, where he was a top executive at the time, he was part the overall success of the film that grossed more than $1.3b (Shs4.8 trillion) worldwide. 

Netflix
In August of the same year (2018), Nagenda left Disney for Netfilx. He’d been at Disney for close to nine years at the time. Today, Nagenda is the vice president of original film at Netflix. 

The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about his move to the giant streamer in which the newspaper referred to him as one of the most high-profile Black film executives in Hollywood. 
“The move is a big get for the digital streaming giant, which is trying to take its movie production arm up to a level…” the paper added.

It is reported in several online magazines that Netflix’s original studio film division, which Nagenda now leads, handles about 20 films of budgets $25m (Shs93b) and up per annum. The Ugandan film executive heads all the processes from acquisition to development to financing. 

“We find great stories and ideas, develop them, package them with amazing talent in front of and behind the camera, and then oversee their production and release into the world,” Nagenda told one reporter recently. 
“Part of our creative advantage is the range and diversity of the content we make.” 

Nagenda is credited for his willingness to change with the ever-evolving industry, particularly as it undergoes one of the biggest shifts in its history; from the cinema to the handset. 

Who is Nagenda?
Nagenda was born to a Ugandan father and a Belizean mother, in 1975, in Los Angeles. He spent his childhood in the same California. 

His father James William Byatesa Nagenda (deceased since January 23), was born in Namutamba. After finishing secondary school education at King’s College Budo, in 1962, he went to England for further studies. 

In 1968, while visiting his sister, Jane Nagenda, in New York, he had the good fortune of meeting a beautiful girl called Ruth Estelle Fairweather at the Afri-Caribbean Social Club in Harlem. He fell in love with her and married her in 1972, four years after meeting her. Their first son was born three years later and they named him Tendo Nagenda.

The young fella visited Uganda several times as a child. In 1987, when Nagenda was 12 years old, the family moved to Uganda where they lived about one and a half years. As it turns out, that short time he lived in Uganda is one of the turning points that set him on a journey into the magical world of movie making. 

He narrates his time here thus: “There was no television or movie theatres to go to. I just did a lot of reading – The Godfather, Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby – and that opened my mind to storytelling. I would say that’s probably the root of what I’m doing now in the film business, which is reading a lot and thinking about stories.”

During his time in Uganda, Nagenda was nicknamed ‘Mzungu’, by his playmates, probably because of his accent and alien behaviour. “Growing up, I was always conscious that I didn’t quite fit in anywhere,” he said. “I was African American, but not really. I was Ugandan, but not really. Belizean, but not really. I was always looking for how to make sense of it.”

“Because I never fit in one place, I learned to make the most of all the places,” Nagenda said. “I can relate to a lot of different experiences. What was an annoyance growing up has become a way into other people’s points of view.”

Nagenda has university degrees in both Economics and Government. He worked as a financial consultant with global firm Deloitte & Touche before changing careers to filmmaking. He worked HBO Films before moving to Warner Independent Pictures as a junior creative executive. He worked at Plan B Entertainment (Brad Pitt’s company) and Good Universe, before becoming Disney’s vice president of production in 2010. Nagenda is 45 years old, and his net worth is $20m (Shs74b).

Entering Netflix 
Da 5 Bloods
If Nagenda’s first project upon entering Netflix is anything to judge the Ugandan film executive by, he’s going to have a lot of success at the global giant.
“It was this spring [2020] that the earliest seeds of his labour bore fruit: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, the first project given the green light under his reign, generated all-important social media buzz and already is in the awards-season conversation,” The Hollywood Reporter writes.
 
To top it all up, the streaming giant added 10.09 million subscribers during the second quarter of 2020 because of the global lockdown, raising its global base to nearly 193 million. This not only pauses great challenges for Nagenda, it is a great opportunity to take over the world of cinema for the next decade or so. Talk about a high-flying Ugandan!