CRÉATION AFRICA: After Netflix success, Bad Influencer creator wants African creatives to own their intellectual property

Kudakwashe “Kudi” Maradzika was just 12 when she decided she wanted to tell stories.

Growing up in Zimbabwe, she watched films such as Jurassic Park and Star Wars. But Maradzika didn’t only want to watch the stories unfolding on screen. She wanted to write them.

She set her sights on becoming a screenwriter and initially imagined studying in the United States. The journey did not unfold quite as the 12-year-old planned, but storytelling remained the thread running through a career that would eventually encompass acting, voice work, writing, directing and producing.

Today Maradzika is the founder of Lincoln Green Media, a television and film production company and intellectual property studio working across South Africa and Zimbabwe. She founded the company in 2022 after working as an executive producer at Paramount Africa.

For Maradzika, leaving the corporate environment meant seeking a new challenge. She was already freelancing as a voice artist and was ready to build something of her own. But entrepreneurship, she discovered, requires more than a good creative idea.

“You have to be tough to be an entrepreneur,” she says.

It requires self-motivation and the will to succeed, but she also stresses the importance of having a supportive network around you.

Netflix’s Global Top 10

That combination of creativity and business is central to Lincoln Green Media, which develops stories and its own intellectual property with the potential to move across different formats – including live-action productions, comic books and animation.

Maradzika’s best-known television creation began with her own experience of the influencer world. Before creating the Netflix series Bad Influencer, she had done influencer work in the fitness space herself, receiving packages from brands containing food, fitness and other products to promote.

She had not produced promotional content for some time when the idea that would eventually become Bad Influencer began taking shape. The concept was subsequently developed through the Realness Institute and Netflix Episodic Lab before becoming a seven-part Netflix series produced by Gambit.

Set in Johannesburg, Bad Influencer follows BK, a struggling single mother and counterfeiter, and Pinky, an aspiring luxury influencer. Their worlds collide in a story that combines social-media aspiration, designer labels, counterfeit goods, crime and the constant pressure to appear more successful than you really are.

Released in October 2025, the series went considerably further than its Johannesburg setting.

It reached number three on Netflix’s Global Top 10 list for English-language television programmes, attracting four million views during the week of 3-9 November.

For Maradzika, that international reach does not mean African creators have to strip their stories of the characteristics that make them local.

Whether a production travels depends partly on its scale and its audience, she says, pointing to productions rooted firmly in local culture that nevertheless succeed because their characters and stories resonate beyond their immediate setting.

Now she is looking beyond conventional television production.

From writing to IP ambitions

Lincoln Green Media describes itself not only as a film and television production company, but as an intellectual property studio – an important distinction in understanding where Maradzika wants to take the business.

“We develop stories and in-house IP to scale across mediums such as comic books, animation and live action,” she says.

One of the projects demonstrating that approach is Artemis Elixa, an original comic-book property Maradzika is developing with ambitions extending beyond the printed page.

She is also working across borders to take an existing African comic into another medium. Maradzika is working with Cameroon-based Zebra Comics to adapt its flagship comic, Beasts of Tazeti, into animation, together with a South Korea-based animation partner.

It is a practical example of the world she wants Lincoln Green Media to inhabit – African stories being developed across countries and creative disciplines, with one piece of intellectual property capable of finding audiences in several different forms.

That ambition forms the backdrop to Maradzika’s selection as one of the 15 entrepreneurs in the second edition of Création Africa, a groundbreaking multimillion-rand development that supports emerging cultural and creative entrepreneurs in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi. The project is an initiative of The French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, and the French Institute of South Africa (Ifas).

The 15 finalists for Creation Africa were chosen from more than 340 applications and will receive mentoring and support aimed at strengthening their businesses and preparing them for growth and investment.

Maradzika is practical about what she wants from the programme.

“My goal is to get things done,” she says.

That means building networks, getting into conversations with people who could become partners and finding opportunities for grants and other support that can help turn creative concepts into viable productions.

She is similarly pragmatic about setbacks. Asked about professional failures, she says she does not spend much time looking for things that have gone wrong. What matters is learning from mistakes and moving forward.

More than two decades after the 12-year-old Maradzika watched Star Wars and decided she wanted to become a screenwriter, the scale of the ambition has changed.

The goal is no longer simply to write something that appears on a television screen.

In five years, she wants Lincoln Green Media to have launched flagship intellectual property in the form of books and animations and established a global division for development and production.

For the child who decided she wanted to tell stories, the story itself remains at the centre of everything.

But now Maradzika wants to see just how far one story can travel. DM

Our writing about Création Africa is made possible, in part, by L’Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud. Création Africa is an initiative of The French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the Embassy of France in South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi, and the French Institute of South Africa (Ifas).