The fifth edition of the Nairobi Literature Festival, stylised as the Nairobi Litfest, ended on Sunday after a three-day event that blended literature, performance, politics and imagination mainly at the Eastlands library, with more events taking place at the MacMillan library and the Kaloleni library.<\/p>\n
The festival launched with a kids\u2019 show and session on Friday, which is part of the festival\u2019s growing children\u2019s programme, and featured a dance session hosted by MC Orpah.<\/p>\n
Presented by Book Bunk and Hay Festival Global, this year\u2019s festival explored \u201cspeculative cartography and South-to-South connections\u201d, bringing together writers, thinkers, artists and activists from across Africa and beyond.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s our roundup of the takeaways from the event.<\/p>\n
Across the festival, conversations rarely stayed confined to books alone; instead, they spilt into questions about memory, identity, ecology, motherhood and the stories societies choose to preserve.<\/p>\n
Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou<\/p>\n
One highlight from a panel about Imagination and mythmaking<\/strong>, which included panellists like Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou and Kenyan novelist Yvonne Owuor, explored storytelling as an act of disruption, discussing how fiction can challenge received truths.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything that we have received as history, certainly as people of the Global South, and particularly from Africa, has not necessarily served the truth or served the vision of who we are as human beings\u2026There is a lot of work that now needs to be done to rewrite a story of lives,\u201d said Ms Owuor.<\/p>\n Separately, while adding his thoughts about an African first narrative approach, Mr Mabanckou said more action was needed in place of conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we\u2019ve been talking about PanAfricanism for decades. We talk, we theorise, we say everything, and I am sick and tired of this kind of explanation because we forget to go to the action. All these people, Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, they spoke about this, but it\u2019s time to express it with our creation.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t the only panel that explored language and narrative<\/strong>. This was also discussed in a panel about conservation and extractive systems<\/strong>, where panellist conservation writer Dr Mordecai Ogada described the enduring \u201cTarzan Narrative\u201d and how it has influenced conservation in Kenya.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Tarzan narrative was a fiction created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912, and is the narrative of a white man who ends up in the jungle in Africa and communicates directly with these wild animals in the jungle and begins protecting them from black people.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the first iterations of Tarzan, black people don\u2019t appear, but when they do, they\u2019re interlopers and criminals. This is based in fiction, but it is amazing how closely it has inspired the reality of conservation practice.\u201d<\/p>\n Writer David Mailu on panel about post-colonial writing<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the festival turned toward literary history<\/strong> through a retrospective on post-independence Kenyan fiction featuring veteran writer David Mailu. During his panel, Mailu emphasised the importance of promoting a reading culture that inspired an intergenerational conversation about literary rebellion, censorship and what earlier generations of writers risked in order to publish boldly.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we don\u2019t read as a nation, and the world is reading, then we are going down, and we are killing our cultural value,\u201d Mr Mailu said. By now, we should have as many bookshops and libraries as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Saturday\u2019s thought-provoking conversations bled into a live musical performance<\/strong> where a sing-along session to Mutoriah\u2019s song \u201cBeta\u201d brought levity to a day filled with hard but important conversations.<\/p>\n\n On Sunday, which happened to be Mother\u2019s Day, the festival turned to mothers examining maternal figures<\/strong> in literature.<\/p>\n Featuring 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature winner and poet, Safiya Sinclair whose memoir, \u2018How to Say Babylon\u2019, chronicles her mother\u2019s strength and sacrifices; Ugandan poet and playwright based in London, Dr. Nick Makokha, whose work explores fatherhood and was recently shortlisted for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize and award-winning Chilean writer and scholar, Lina Meruane whose essay, Contra los Hijos (Against Children) warns of the dangers of conservative ecofeminist ideals.<\/p>\n Watch the full panel.<\/a><\/p>\n The post Nairobi Litfest roundup<\/a> appeared first on KBC Digital<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The fifth edition of the Nairobi Literature Festival, stylised as the Nairobi Litfest, ended on Sunday after a three-day event that blended literature, performance, politics and imagination mainly at the Eastlands library, with more events taking place at the MacMillan library and the Kaloleni library. The festival launched with a kids\u2019 show and session on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chezaspin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}