Barbara Minishi Mboya’s GoDown Arts Centre is the largest multidisciplinary arts space in East Africa In 1989, Joy Mboya ’85 was an architect by day and sang in a band by night. She had returned to her hometown, Nairobi, Kenya, after Princeton, and eventually she and her bandmates quit their jobs to devote themselves to Musikly Speaking, their all-women group, which blended Kenyan folk songs and Western harmonies. “Women in popular music in Nairobi was quite unusual,” she says. The band broke up, and Mboya earned a postgraduate degree in voice studies at the National Institute for Dramatic Arts in Australia. When she returned to Nairobi, she didn’t pursue architecture or singing. Instead, she set out to create a place that would mentor young artists.