Macondo Literary Festival is now one of Africa’s essential cultural rendezvous, a yearly promise kept that literature, when gathered in public, can still quicken the pulse of a people.
By Frank Njugi
Every literary festival seeks a theme that feels less like homework and more like a prophecy of what to expect upon attendance. Last weekend, East Africa’s biggest literary gathering, the Macondo Literary Festival, opened its fifth edition under the theme, Chronicles & Currents. “Currents” promised a whirl of literary ideas and identities refusing to sit still, while “Chronicles” reminded us that literature also serves as a record-keeper, a scribe of wounds and victories. Together, the phrase carried the weight of a manifesto, urging attendees to grapple with the present without losing sight of history’s long shadow.
The Macondo Literary Festival has always been presented as a first: the only festival on the continent willing to seat Anglophone and Lusophone African writers of history, fictionalised or otherwise, at the same table.
Last year’s edition staged that ambition brilliantly, corralling voices across continents into a common chorus. This year, the fifth, the festival doubled down on that experiment, widening its orbit to include not just Africa but also South American and Caribbean voices.
The fifth Macondo Literary Festival did not so much begin as spill into three days of panels and performances attempting to live up to its mouthful of a theme. Friday the 19th opened with a double bill that made the festival’s ambitions clear: a workshop titled “Creating From Oralities: A Caribbean Get Tugeda to Thread Rhythm!”, where Colombian writer, Cristina Bendek, guided participants in exploring writing as both craft and spiritual journey; and another, “The (Im)possibility of Literary Translation”, led by British translator, Daniel Hahn, on turning the impossible into the only thing that matters. Side by side, these sessions offered the festival’s first lessons.
The afternoon dug even deeper. Jamaican writer, Marcia Douglas’s “Archaeology of Storytelling” traced fiction back to its bones: histories, folklore, and spirituality, while Barbadian writer, Karen Lord’s “Writing Sociological Fiction” insisted that novels, however speculative, are also laboratories of the social imagination.
By the time the opening ceremony arrived in the evening, the festival had already declared its intent: it was not going to be a polite carousel of readings, but a generous experiment in what happens when you put voices in the same room and ask them to remember, argue, and invent together.
The second day, the 20th, unfolded like a marathon, with sessions running thick and fast across two stages of the festival’s annual home, the Kenya Cultural Centre. There was the intimacy of Ukumbi Mdogo, the mini-auditorium, and, just a few steps away, the grander sweep of the Kenya National Theatre, the main auditorium that has long doubled as the country’s cultural proscenium.
Some of the most intriguing passages of the second day came in sessions such as the main one, “Let’s Talk Africa!”, the festival’s signature roundtable, which returned with its restless question: what does it mean, in this age of dislocation and connection, to belong to Africa and simultaneously to the world?
The gathering’s voices spanned continents: Brazilian Itamar Vieira Junior, Jamaican Marcia Douglas, Nigerian Yewande Omotoso, Tunisian Yamen Manai, and Kenyan Joe Kobuthi, braided together under the deft moderation of Kenyan Mshai Mwangola, producing the kind of conversation that never quite closes but instead lingers afterwards.
Later, the session, “World-Makers, Future-Crafters, Story-Shapers”, brought to the main stage a younger generation unwilling to inherit silence. Among them, human rights defender, Stoneface Bombaa; Qwani founder, Keith Ang’ana; and Kenyan historian and digital heritage specialist, Chao Tayiana, in dialogue with moderator, Alex Wanjala, spoke with the urgency of those raised amid social media firestorms and meme arsenals, their voices charged with an imagination already drafting blueprints for a world not yet here. If the earlier session traced the continuities of history, this one insisted on rupture, on burning illusions before they calcify into structures too heavy to move.
Across at Ukumbi Mdogo, the morning opened with “The Mother Tongue and the Other Tongue”, an exploration of how language both preserves and betrays memory. Mauritian author, Priya Hein, alongside Marcia Douglas and Daniel Hahn, guided by Duncan Yoon, an Associate Professor at New York University, treated language as a current—sometimes intimate, sometimes estranging—that carries identity across shifting shores.
The smaller stage also hosted the launch of Hein’s new novel, Tamarin. Set against the haunted beaches of La Preneuse, Mauritius, the novel invokes the ghosts of colonial history. Godwin Siundu presided over its launch.
The day closed with a hush, as the main auditorium dimmed for a screening of the Dominican Republic/Spanish film, Sugar Island (2024), Johanné Gómez Terrero’s haunting portrait of a teenage girl, Makenya, thrust into adulthood within a sugarcane community on the verge of erasure.
The festival’s final day began with the host country stepping fully into the spotlight. Kenya Writes, which has, since 2022, served as the festival’s annual mirror—a session where the country’s literary pulse is taken in real time—set the tone.
On stage, spoken word artiste Dorphanage, author Natasha Muhanji, and Commonwealth Short Story Prize-shortlisted writer, Dorechi, guided by Aleya Kassam, spoke of how voice, structure, and emotional truth shift under the pressures of a changing Kenya.
The conversation circled around questions of what these writers are listening to in their environments—politically, culturally, imaginatively—and how new work bends or even fractures inherited forms in order to capture the texture of Kenyan life.
By afternoon, the festival had widened its aperture. Across at Ukumbi Mdogo, the session, “Myths that Travel: Folklore, Spirits and Ancestral Worlds across the Atlantic”, brought Marcia Douglas and Itamar Vieira Junior back into dialogue about spiritual systems that move through bloodlines and memory. Moderated again by Aleya Kassam, the panel conjured myths as living things, sometimes as an inheritance, always insistently present.
Back in the main auditorium, a session on “Blackness, African-ness and the Politics of Colour” turned the gaze inward, asking what it means to inhabit a body that the world insists on ranking. Kenyan entomologist and evolutionary biologist, Dino Martins, Cristina Bendek, Yamen Manai, and Yewande Omotoso, steered once more by Mshai Mwangola, considered how skin has been commodified and weaponised, and how literature might open space to reframe belonging and power.
The late afternoon returned us to migration and memory. Priya Hein, Trinidadian writer, Kevin Jared Hosein, and Kenyan filmmaker, Sham Patel, with Alex Wanjala moderating, traced passages across the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, asking how exile and forced displacement sculpt both the stories that are told and the silences that persist. The session was titled “Across the Waters: Languages and Lives of Journey, Invention and Home-Choosing”.
And then came the music. At the close of the festival, the venue transformed into a concert as guitarist Kato Change brought Macondo 5.0’s formal programme to an end, joined by vocalist, Lisa Oduor Noah, drummer, Christian Kibamba, and bassist, Jonathan Gardener. Yet, the evening refused to stop there. The festival’s music curator, Kiuri Mburathi, hosted “Courtyard Currents”, turning the final night into a street-level celebration—bodies moving, voices lifted—the festival’s fifth edition ending with a pulse.
Since its founding in 2019, the Macondo Literary Festival has steadily become the heart of Eastern Africa’s literary community. Its consistency of vision—maintaining both rigour and openness—has earned it international esteem, with Condé Nast Traveler naming it among the world’s top nine literary festivals. That recognition reflects the festival’s ability to convene conversations that feel urgent and inseparable from the shifting world beyond the auditorium.
Macondo continues to prove that literary festivals are not simply about books but about ecosystems, making visible the networks of thought and solidarity that keep culture thriving. The myth of the aloof intellectual dissolves here, replaced by a community that is dynamic and profoundly engaged.
The Macondo Literary Festival is now one of Africa’s essential cultural rendezvous: a yearly promise kept that literature, when gathered in public, can still quicken the pulse of a people.
Frank Njugi, an award-winning Kenyan Writer, Culture journalist and Critic, has written on the East African and African culture scene for platforms such as Debunk Media, Republic Journal, Sinema Focus, Culture Africa, Drummr Africa, The Elephant, Wakilisha Africa, The Moveee, Africa in Dialogue, Afrocritik and others.