Nairobi to host the Macondo continental literary festival

The world is still taken up with the death and funeral of England’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, who passed on, aged 96, on September 8, 2022.

Much has already been said and written —and still will be — about her legacy and her seven-decade-long stay at the apogee of monarchical rule in England, as well as 14 other jurisdictions around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Jamaica.

In Africa, however, where Britain creamed off for herself more than a dozen countries at the 1885 Berlin Conference, as France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal carved up the rest among themselves, a rare literary salon bringing together writers from around the continent and Brazil, co-organised and hosted by Kenya’s Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, novelist and winner of the now-AKO Caine Prize for African Writing (2003), is slated for Nairobi between September 30 and October 2, 2022.

Renowned authors, including 74-year-old Tanzanian-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, are set to descend on the Kenyan capital and be part of the event dubbed “The Future of Memories”, moderated by the Macondo Literary Festival, a brainchild of Ms Owuor’s.

The event, which will, for the very first time, bring together Brazilian, Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone African writers, is aimed at encouraging and facilitating interaction across and beyond the limits of language, culture and colonial heritage.

The organisers shall also be seeking to inspire mutual understanding of African countries’ disparate colonial histories.

According to journalist Anja Bengelstorff, co-founder of the Macondo Literary Festival, the three-day event, set to feature authors of both fictional and non-fictional works at the Kenya National Theatre in Nairobi, will “cater to Africans’ need for a space to have conversations about their histories and futures, and share and grow the love of the written word.”

The festival, according to Bengelstorff, “will be a multifaceted event, encompassing literature and other forms of art, and feature a series of panel discussions, meet-the-author sessions and intriguing workshops on issues of shared histories — things that unite and/or separate Africans based on the authors’ works.”

Authors, including Mozambican Mia Couto, José Eduardo Agualusa and Yara Monteiro from Angola (poetry and fiction writers), Patrice Nganang, a Cameroonian scholar and activist, Nadifa Mohamed, author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Fortune Men (2021), Sylvie Kandé, a poet and scholar from Senegal, Hafsa Zayyan from the United Kingdom, Naivo from Madagascar and Abdulai Silá of Guinea-Bissau, will discuss, among others, how, through their own works, they create Africa and “how readers can extend their horizons of what Africa is and what it’s not.”

History in poetry

A part of the session will be specially dedicated to the discussion and exploration of “History in Poetry.” And another will offer the audience a guide to the digital rendering of oral storytelling through virtual reality headsets. 

The presence of Lusophone and Francophone African authors at this year’s event is also a great opportunity for the Kenyan public to interact with literary and artistic works by artists from outside their regional enclave of Eastern Africa. 

“Separated by official languages, geography and strategic regions, our continent is unknown to itself today more than ever. In the field of literature, we know little of what our neighbours are debating and publishing... African literary festivals can be a way to break this isolation and reciprocal ignorance. This success will make us bigger and bring us closer, African and non-African writers and readers alike,” said Mia Couto.

A number of writers from Africa are increasingly using history as a source and topic of their writing to great effect, with a growing readership “keen on their own stories.”]

These texts deepen, diversify and interrogate the perceived “official” narratives of the continent’s past, such as those by former colonial masters or other dominant political entities. The authors are trying to fill the voids of history where African voices are missing.

Popular Kenyan cartoonist Gado will also be conducting a workshop on “Caricaturing History”, while Kenyan film-maker Wanuri Kahiu will discuss science fiction storytelling following the public screening of her 2009 short film Pumzi.

Now, how is the coming together of African writers in different languages to discuss a shared appreciation for, experience and the future prospects of literature important to the development of the art?

Unlike in other parts of the world, notably in the West, where writers have easily and long written about events in locales other than their own countries of birth, writers in Africa have, in their own works, historically been inspired by and depicted events within the borders of their respective home countries.

The corollary of this is that their respective audiences and readership have long been “indoctrinated” into appreciating and being knowledgeable about only those histories of and events in their native countries.

The language barrier and a relatively lower translation rate have also conspired to confine readers to not-so-many options with respect to the literary works they can access and consume. As such, a reader, or even writer, from, say Kenya, an Anglophone country, will readily appreciate works by writers from Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria or Zimbabwe, but not Angola, Senegal or Cameroon.

Have you noticed, for example, that the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing is only awarded to writers from Anglophone Africa?

Does this mean that works by writers from Francophone Africa, for example, aren’t as prize-worthy? No.

What’s the potential of a language-based literary award, such as the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, to aid in the augmentation of literacy efforts in a dialect-riven region such as Africa? 

Warning to a household worries the gatekeeper most; it’s the reason historians, journalists and artists are to be found in the same box as sentries. Artists and scholars of history signpost society in the direction of enlightenment, away from the ignorance and the encumbrance of developmental vacuity.

In segregation-era America, for instance, it took the works of scholars, poets and thinkers such as James Russell Lowell, Henry David Thoreau and William Cullen Bryant to inspire the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is an artist on a mission. However, hers is a dream whose time should have been yesterday.

We would have felt the manifold benefits of greater co-operation as Africans long ago had the pioneers of African writing hit on Ms Owuor’s idea then.

The enhanced informational reach flowing from widespread knowledgeability about the continent’s writers’ works would already have yielded the long-hoped-for object of owning our stories and the telling of these.

Rather than the near-exclusive portrait of the villainy and infamy of colonial-era Africa, corresponding promotional translation of fellow African writers’ works, for example, would go a long way towards helping the collective understanding and appreciation of our experiential propinquity with regards to the indignities of colonialism.

Mr Baraza is a votary of global peace, historian, writer, thinker and founder of Public Affairs Volunteers for Global Peace and Climate Justice (PAVGPCJ). [email protected]