Charles Kinga does not immediately strike you as someone who can talk for hours. When we meet on August 25 in the lobby of Go Hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital and largest city, he appears quiet, almost understated. I am in the Danish capital for TechBBQ, the annual Nordic technology gathering, where Kinga heads its Nordic-Africa Startup Summit.
Yet Kinga is a natural storyteller, the kind who takes the scenic detour but never loses sight of the destination. A simple question about his move to Denmark detours through Punjab, running a cocktail bar in India, and sorting letters on Copenhagen night shifts. Somewhere along this journey, he was also a musician, which perhaps explains the lyrical quality with which he tells these stories.
He has lived among enough cultures to belong comfortably to several. Kenya is home. Denmark is home. India, where he spent some time, left its own imprint. He speaks several languages and seems fascinated by the small customs through which societies reveal themselves.
Today, Kinga is Head of the Nordic-Africa Initiative at TechBBQ, a job that requires him to persuade two ecosystems that often misunderstand each other to sit at the same table.
He is thoughtful, entertaining and unusually optimistic about African technology. But his optimism is not uncritical. Africa’s growth story, he thinks, is sometimes exaggerated. Founders and investors misunderstand each other. And putting African entrepreneurs on Copenhagen stages means little unless conversations eventually become capital.
Over our conversation, Kinga talks about belonging, money, culture, and why Africa needs more than another platform startup.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start before TechBBQ. Where did you grow up, and what kind of home did you grow up in? What did your parents do, and what did success mean in that household?
I grew up in Nairobi, in Jericho, Mumbi Estate. I went to Martin Luther Primary School, one of the oldest schools in Eastlands.
Growing up in Eastlands at that time was interesting because it was one of Nairobi’s main residential areas. People like Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Mwai Kibaki, who later became president, lived there. So you had a good mix of middle-class families and hardworking people like my parents.
My mother was a nursery school headmistress, and my father worked in tourism as a tour guide and driver. My mother had a better education than my dad. He had dropped out of school before independence and went on to work within the colonial system, only to later join the Mau Mau and fight in Kenya’s war for independence.
There’s actually an interesting podcast in Danish where my father and I interview each other about that period and his experience during the war for independence.
Success in our household looked pretty much the same as it does today. You had a job and a stable life. You were not a social outcast. You probably had a car and good social circles. For children, success meant doing well in school, passing their exams, and, if possible, becoming what in Kenya we call “number one in class”.
Then, when I was about eight, I moved to the countryside. I had just finished Standard Two. We went to visit my grandfather in Makueni County, near the border between the Maasai and Kamba communities, and I refused to come back to Nairobi.
I had seen paradise. I realised the countryside was where I really wanted to be. So I started Standard Three at a rural school in Makueni. There was dust everywhere. I arrived at school wearing shoes, and the headmaster sent me home. He basically asked me who I thought I was and told me I needed to come back looking like all the other children.
That became one of the best periods of my life. Ultimately, when I think about home, I still think about that countryside.
You have lived in Denmark for about 25 years. What took you there in the first place? Do you remember arriving—the weather, the people, the first moment you thought, what have I done?
I came to Denmark as a fully grown man. I wasn’t coming here looking for a better life. I was looking for another life—a new challenge.
I had lived in India for about 10 years and went to university there. While there, I met some Danes. One of them became my girlfriend and later the mother of my first daughter.
I initially came to Denmark as a tourist. I wanted to see whether this was somewhere that could work for me. Could I get a proper job with the education I received in India?
The culture shock was there, absolutely. I had experienced snow while living in Punjab, up north towards the Himalayas, but Denmark was different. I arrived in October. It was a bit dull. The people were nice, though. Nobody looked at you strangely. Maybe they were friendlier then, or perhaps that’s just how I remember it.
At one point, I wanted to write a book called The Land of Small Things. I realised that bigness—the kind you might associate with America—isn’t really a Danish or Scandinavian thing. Even the street signs seemed small. There wasn’t too much pomp.
The society was like that too. I found a place that was organised and based on trust. People trust you and expect the same from you. You don’t have to hustle or push people around to be seen. Nobody is really a superstar. A minister can take the bus. The prime minister can bicycle to work.
I thought: this is my kind of place. So I decided to do one of the things I had learnt from living elsewhere: learn the language. I learnt Danish really fast. Within about a year and a half, I could speak it.
You studied African Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Why study Africa after leaving Africa? Did distance change the way you understood the continent?
That’s exactly the point. Before I went into African Studies, this would have been my fourth degree. I didn’t really need another degree. What I wanted was an education from a Danish university because, from my experience living and studying in India, I had realised that universities give you a particular footing for understanding a society.
Initially, I looked at studying interpretation—the kind of interpreters you see at the United Nations (UN). I thought that would be a good degree because I speak several languages and languages come fairly naturally to me.
Then I discovered African Studies at the University of Copenhagen. I called the administrator, who is still a friend of mine, and he told me to send in my credentials. They accepted me. Once I got there, it became very important for me to take the back seat.
I wanted to understand how Africa was studied from here. I also wanted to understand my own bias. If I’m sitting in a classroom discussing Kenya, Congo, or Somalia, am I sitting there as an African with a bias that blinds me?
So I approached the studies on a very strict scientific basis. I tried to take the African out of myself and sit there like an anthropologist or scientist dissecting a small bird or lizard—just looking at the facts, nothing less, nothing more.
That was important to me.
What did you do for money in those early Danish years? What was your first job, what did it pay, and what could that salary actually buy you?
My first job was as a bartender.
When I lived in India, I had actually run a cocktail bar that I started from scratch while I was supposed to be studying law. So when I came to Denmark and started learning Danish, a classmate told me that the Hilton Hotel near the airport was looking for a temporary bartender.
I applied by showing up properly dressed—the right shoes, the waistcoat, everything. An Englishman with a Cockney accent interviewed me, and we got on well. I worked there for about six months. The money was enough for food, rent, and transport. I was self-sufficient. I didn’t need social assistance.
Then I wanted something more permanent and applied to work at the Danish post office. The post office doesn’t exist in quite the same way anymore, but it was a major institution then. They had huge terminals where letters from across the country arrived, were sorted, and then sent to different parts of Denmark and the world.
I worked at one of those depots for two years on the night shift. It was quite tough on the body and the psyche. When my daughter was born, I took paternity leave and then quit my job. After that, I applied to university and started receiving Danish student support. It’s not much, but it can cover your rent. You can supplement it with a loan or take a student job for a limited number of hours.
You now spend your working life connecting two very different places. Where is home? When you land in Africa, do you feel African, and when you return to Copenhagen, do you feel Danish?
Anywhere I step. Let’s do an experiment. Next time I come to Nairobi, meet me at the airport. Let me find my own taxi. Let me talk to the boys trying to hustle you for a ride outside. You’ll be surprised by the kind of Swahili that will come out of me.
I feel 100% at home when I reach Kenya. People say smells and other senses can trigger something inside you, and I understand that. When I arrive in Nairobi and get into a taxi, I feel like I’m where I belong.
At the same time, when I arrive in Denmark, it isn’t really a switch. I don’t want to sound schizophrenic, but I’m very Danish too. If a police officer speaks to me in English when I’m arriving from Africa, I’ll switch to Danish very quickly. It is partly my way of saying: I also belong here.
If I landed in India, it would probably be the same thing. I have an Indian colleague with whom I occasionally speak Hindi. But ultimately, the home that is going to be my home is the savannah where I used to look after my grandfather’s cattle. That’s really home.
How did you actually end up at TechBBQ? Did you propose building an Africa programme, or did someone at TechBBQ see that opportunity first?
I ended up at TechBBQ because I applied for a job as Head of Projects. I wrote the CEO, Avnit Singh, on LinkedIn and told him I had applied. He and I knew each other from way back. We had been involved in an association together at some point.
He wrote back saying the role wasn’t quite the right profile for me, but there was something else he thought could be interesting. In that sense, he sort of headhunted me. He proposed that I take over something focused on Africa.
We wrote back and forth and eventually sat down to discuss the project: the scope, expectations, pay, and everything else. It started under very difficult circumstances. There was really no money when we started the Africa track last year. It was an idea, and then we had to go out and fundraise.
We succeeded in getting the seed funding. When I came in, we raised more and received very good support from the Danish ecosystem.
This is only the second time we’re doing it. For me, it feels good because there were moments at the beginning when it would have been easy to give up.
You built the first Nordic-Africa Startup Summit in roughly 100 days. What did those 100 days really look like—who did you call first, and how difficult was it to convince Nordic investors this was worth their time?
Those 100 days were a complete exercise in counterintuitive thinking. If you told most people what we were trying to do, they would probably say, “You’re completely mad, and I don’t even want to talk to you.”
But I like that space. The first thing I did was ask myself whether I could get big names to come and speak about technology in Africa—people like Strive Masiyiwa, James Mwangi of Equity Bank, and Professor Bitange Ndemo.
Professor Ndemo was one of the first people I contacted. I asked whether he would be interested in giving a keynote on Kenya’s blueprint for the digital economy. He wrote back saying yes. I went to the CEO and said, “Look, we’ve got Professor Ndemo.”
He asked, “Who is he?” I explained. He said, “Wow, okay. So you think this is possible?”
I said, “Now I’m going to build this backwards.” My thinking was that I needed names that could attract other names. If we could get Professor Ndemo, Strive Masiyiwa, or James Mwangi, we could find everybody else.
The main sponsor at that point was Novo Nordisk, which pledged some money. Then the Bestseller Foundation came in. The sponsors naturally had their own interests, both geographically and by sector. Africa is a big place; you have to bite it into smaller chunks. My job was to balance those interests with the sectors where I thought we could genuinely create impact.
There is an uncomfortable history behind Europeans arriving in Africa with capital and good intentions. When you talk about an “equal partnership”, how do you prevent Nordic-Africa collaboration from becoming development aid wearing VC clothes?
The simple answer is that I spend time with the venture capital firms we bring into this. The VCs you saw on stage last year—I had meetings with them. I wanted to know who they were, what they did, how they did it, what they were building, and how they dealt with founders.
I also needed to see whether they had a support system for founders. Building a startup is not easy. A startup is supposed to move from zero to 100 within a very short time, and there is a very high chance it will crash. That takes a heavy toll on founders. Even when they succeed, many burn out. So I wanted to understand whether the VCs recognised that balance and how they dealt with it.
I also sought out European investors who live in Africa and Nordic founders who moved to Africa to build companies. Then I spoke to prominent African founders such as Juliana Rotich and Hilda Moraa, who were on stage last year.
Part of that was about understanding the VC world they operate in. But there was also another question: how do we blend venture capital with some of the good things philanthropy and charitable capital can do?
The other part is bringing in more interesting founders. They can be younger or older; that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are building for real problems on the ground. And I would particularly like to see founders building infrastructure, not only platforms designed to solve here-and-now problems.
Nordic investors have capital, but African startups often complain that European investors misunderstand African risk. Having sat between both sides, what do Nordic investors get wrong about African founders, and what do African founders misunderstand about Nordic investors?
It’s a double-edged sword. One thing Nordic investors don’t always understand is African founders’ operating environment. These are two cultures meeting.
Of course, the world is global. If you send an Excel sheet to somebody in Lagos, they can work on it exactly as somebody sitting in Oslo would. That’s not the difference. The difference is how we operationalise things. Business cultures can clash.
That can be addressed by spending time together before an investor puts money into a company and finding some middle ground. You will never completely remove culture from people. Actually, culture might not even be the best word. It is traditions and customs—things people have done for centuries, often without even realising they do them.
What would have to happen for you to say the Nordic-Africa experiment worked, and what do you want Charles Kinga himself to be doing then?
Charles Kinga will be retired, living somewhere outside a metropolis and enjoying himself. What I would like to see before then is genuine collaboration—a space where people talk to each other, exchange ideas and, from those ideas, do deals.
And by deals, I mean proper deals. I want somebody to be able to say, “We’re putting capital into this small startup. We’re patient. We’ll wait five years. We’ll wait 10 years.”
I have a feeling that started happening last year, although perhaps in a fragmented way. There were signs of it. A lot of what I did this year was based on those observations and on the feedback we received.
The dinner before the summit, for example, came from something very simple. People were saying, “I’ve seen this person, and I need a platform where I can actually meet them.”
That platform cannot always be the hectic TechBBQ venue. So you create another space where those deeper conversations can happen and let TechBBQ be where the broader ecosystem is showcased.
We cannot publicly talk about everything discussed in those rooms. But what I would like to see is actual movement: founders who were on stage continuing conversations with investors who were in the room.
I could already see some of that happening. During TechBBQ, somebody would come to me and say, “I’m looking for so-and-so. Can you introduce me? I heard they’re here.” And I could say, “Yes, they’re here. They were at the dinner.” That is very satisfying.
Because ultimately, that is the point: not simply putting African founders on a stage in Copenhagen, but creating the conditions for people who would otherwise never meet to find each other, talk, and eventually do something together.
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