Talking to a new friend in 2014, acclaimed Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor complained aloud, “Why do I have to go to Europe and America to meet African writers who are writing in other languages?”
Thus, the idea for the Macondo Literary Festival was born. Ms Owuor had met journalist Anja Bengelstorff to talk about her novel “Dust” and a friendship blossomed, through books and, they both laugh about it, Ms Bengelstorff’s baking.
Macondo is a fictional town in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famed novel, “100 Years of Solitude”.
The duo took the name and hoped to literally recreate as Ms Bengelstorff puts it, “a place where magical things happen!”
Ms Owuor brought in her invaluable experience of running the Zanzibar International Film Festival.
She says, “We thought, this is where we could offer Kenyan and African readers, wherever they are from, show [them] that African literature is more than what is written in English.”
Africa’s sea people
Under the pillars of African history, its future and the art of translating literature, with Ms Bengelstorff’s attention to detail and Ms Owuor’s networks in the literary community, the first event was held in 2019 to an audience they found hungry to partake of what they were serving.
“Bringing in Ziwa Kuu, which others call the Indian Ocean or the Swahili seas into this mix is asking, What does it mean for us to be a sea people? We don’t talk enough about Africans as historically maritime human beings,” Ms Owuor speaks on this year’s theme, The Sea is History.
The Macondo-lites
One would ask how bringing Arabophone, Lusophone (Portuguese speaking), Francophone, Anglophone and Hispanophone writers to Nairobi would work with the city’s audience in terms of the language
