The Future of Memories: Connecting Africa’s histories and futures through literature
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The Macondo Literary Festival’s second edition, dubbed ‘The Future of Memories’, brings together, for the first time on the continent, Brazilian, Anglophone, Lusophone and Francophone African writers in conversation across and beyond the limits of language.
The biggest literary festival this year in East Africa organized by the Macondo Book Society will feature authors of both fictional and nonfictional works at the Kenya Cultural Center in Nairobi, Kenya, from September 30th to October 2nd 2022.
The three days event will be attended by award-winning African authors including Abdulrazak Gurnah 2021, Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing winner, José Eduardo Agualusa from Angola, Yara Monteiro, poetry and fiction author, Patrice Nganang, an award-winning Cameroonian author, Nadifa Mohamed, the writer of the renowned novel Black Mamba Boy (2009), Sylvie Kandé, an award-winning poet and scholar from Senegal, Roberta Estrela D'Alva from Brazil, Mia Couto, Mozambique, Hafsa Zayyan- from United Kingdom, Naivo Patrick from Madagascar, and Abdulai Silá the author of the first novel that was ever published in Guinea-Bissau. The festival caters to the need of Kenyans for a space to have pertinent conversations, share and grow the love of the written word.
The second edition of the Macondo Literary Festival after the inaugural event in 2019 will be a multifaceted event, centered around literature, but also include other forms of art. The festival will feature a series of panel discussions, readings, interviews, meet-the-author sessions, and intriguing workshops on issues of shared histories, things that unite and or separate us based on the authors’ works of historical (non) fiction.
The first-of-its-kind festival in East Africa will put a special focus on anticipated, predicted, and imagined African futures and how history, home, identity, and belonging expressed in one language can be translated into the world of another fostering a shared African history and aspirations by authors across the continent.
Almost all contemporary African literature read in Anglophone African countries such as Kenya is originally written in English, by authors from other former British colonies such as Nigeria, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. Translations of works by authors from the Lusophone and Francophone spheres of Africa into English have been rare. The consequence of this void is that African authors tell their stories and create works of art, but they are not heard or read beyond their own linguistic realm.
The presence of Lusophone and Francophone authors in this year’s festival offers a great opportunity for the Kenyan public to discover their works, engage with them and learn about the history and fictional imagination of these in Kenya’s widely unknown spheres of Africa – a part of the richly diverse African productions and heritage.
In Africa, a new generation of writers is using history as the source, material, and artefact to great effect, with a growing readership keen on “their own stories.” These texts deepen, diversify and interrogate the received ‘official narratives of the continent’s past, like those by former colonial powers or other dominant political entities.
The authors are trying to fill the voids of history where African voices are missing, to find words for the unspeakable of recent tragedies, and to distance themselves from the legacy of colonial powers.
Their texts are proposing that so much more remains unheard and unseen that would gesture to the deeper and complex histories of the continent, exposing the arguably intellectually debilitating colonial experience and post-colonial compromises.
The first edition of the Macondo Literary Festival dubbed the ‘Histories, stories, worlds and words’ held in 2019, featured 12 artists from eight African countries and Brazil with published works on historical fiction and non-fiction and attracted over 600 visitors from the East African region.
The festival’s 18 sessions and four workshops provided a platform for the exploration of belonging, identity, and history among Anglophone and Lusophone authors and audiences in Kenya whose societies were artificially separated through colonial demarcations, but similarly impacted by different forces of history.
About us
The Macondo Book Society is a non-profit organization registered in Kenya. Its mandate is to celebrate and promote a culture of reading, writing, and literature in general in Kenya and beyond.
Anja Bengelstorff (Chairperson), MA, co-founder, director and curator, has been living in Kenya for 15 years, an award-winning correspondent for media in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and Programme Officer for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Treasurer), MA, MPhil, co-founder, acclaimed Kenyan novelist, winner of, among others, the Caine Prize for African Writing 2003; author of the widely celebrated novels „Dust“ (2013) and „The Dragonfly Sea“ (2019)
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