Michelle Lemuya Ikeny: Kenyan actress takes on child marriage in Nawi
27 Jan 2025
The 15-year-old star of a film about a schoolgirl forced to marry an older man is evangelical about her role - despite the fact that her community in north-western Kenya might see it as a betrayal and treat her as an outcast.
"I want the movie to spark conversations about this topic, because it's really not something people want to talk about," Michelle Lemuya Ikeny tells the BBC.
She plays 13-year-old Nawi, the eponymous heroine of the coming-of-age film set in Turkana county, a rural area which borders Uganda and where the UN says one in four girls are married before they are 18.
"So many of my friends have had to leave school, or never been to school because someone paid a dowry to marry them, so their fathers had married them off," she says.
Michelle, who grew up in Turkana where the film was shot, kept these girls in mind when portraying Nawi's emotions - a performance that won her an Africa Movie Academy Award for best promising actor last November.
Like all the local children who star in the film, she had never acted before. When she signed up for it, she thought she would just be appearing in a school drama.
"It has changed my life, but I don't want it to change my personality," the teenager says.