Sak Abdi
@sakofalltrades.bsky.social
318 followers 403 following 156 posts
Award-losing PR & Marketing spellsword @fireflyworlds | Design mischief ⚡ Indie Cup Juror 🏆 Champion of the Sun ☀️
Award-losing PR & Marketing spellsword @fireflyworlds | Design mischief ⚡ Indie Cup Juror 🏆 Champion of the Sun ☀️
![“At least three people before me in the queue were denied without having their documents looked at,” they said. “In fact, as I left the consulate, someone else who had their visa approved with no issue, who had no travel history and did not provide concrete travel plans, asked me if I noticed what was happening inside. You can probably guess what the main difference between myself and this other applicant is.”
Myres believes he was only able to attend SGF on behalf of Nyamakop because of his unique history: While he was born in Australia, his parents moved to South Africa when he was just six months old. Due to their histories and his own, he possesses an Australian passport, a South African passport, and a British passport. This has repeatedly come in handy for Nyamakop, which – even prior to the past few years’ documented increase in refusal rates of visas from African countries – faced difficulties when it came to visiting Western countries.
"We had the same problem on our previous project where, if I didn't have a British passport, basically our company wouldn't exist,” Myres told Aftermath. “Because if you don't have enough lead time to go to important events, you just can't get a visa from an African country. And on [Relooted] specifically, it's kind of fucked up to be making a game about reclaiming African artifacts that are in Western countries, and Africans [on the team] can't even visit those artifacts. Hundreds of dollars in visa application fees, and then it might get declined. Thousands of dollars for accommodations and flights just to even visit your own cultural heritage, and that's a best-case scenario. But in this case, most of the people on the continent can't even get a visa to travel [to the United States]."](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5gdejlhcswjbzraadoltdpps/bafkreihle42aqaz7bqvfvn7m73hajdyp6cn4tfmzjyy2anhrderhix56ru)
