The NBO LitFest 2023, organised by Book Bunk, was hosted in venues in Nairobi from August 25 – 27, 2023.
I attended the festival and moderated the panel “The City as Muse” alongside panellists featured Damilare Kuku, Kevin Mwachiro, and Linda Musita.
I shall be doing a tour of Mozambique starting in August 28. In my time there, I will be launching AS Madames the Portuguese edition of my debut novel as well as conducting masterclasses and other activities. All details can be found on the poster.
Join me as I host Prudence Katomeni and Maimouna Jallow for our final Artistic Encounters event on the Strauhof’s LitAfrika YouTube page on the art of adaptation. The event on August 17th will run at 10 Ghana Mean Time/11 Nigeria time/Midday SA time/13h Kenyan time.
Prudence’s music that she created as inspired by Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 and Maimouna’s performance was inspired by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms as part of the current LitAfrika II exhibition that I curated which has been running at Strauhof Museum in Zurich since June 16 until September 3.
If you are anywhere close to Zurich and you haven’t seen it yet, please take a turn. You won’t regret it.
Update: If you missed the event, check the video here;
I am calling on my friends to help celebrate her birthday this year by making a meaningful impact on the lives of young girls through the Mina Foundation. On this special occasion, let’s come together to support an incredible cause that was close to the heart of our late friend, Eusebius McKaiser.
Eusebius dedicated his life to fighting against the indignity and inhumanity of structural poverty and inequalities, particularly those faced by women and girls. He passionately raised his voice to shed light on the unyielding violence experienced by women and girls, especially those grappling with the daily challenges of period poverty. Did you know that more than 3 million girls miss about a quarter of their schooling days due to period poverty? This staggering reality moved Eusebius to join the Mina Foundation’s noble mission to eradicate period poverty. In November 2017, he became a Board Member and tirelessly championed urgent conversations about period poverty, focusing on educational institutions, and corporate South Africa, and actively involving young boys and men in understanding and eradicating this issue. Eusebius often reminded us, “If men experienced periods, sanitary pads and tampons would be free for all.”
The Mina Foundation’s goal is to provide period cups to 1 million girls, ensuring they have the resources they need for a dignified and uninterrupted education. Through partnerships like Gift of the Givers, they are making great strides towards achieving this goal. Eusebius actively participated in roadshows across universities, training students in period cup use, and sparking vital conversations about period poverty. As a social enterprise, the Mina Foundation dedicates all its proceeds to providing free period cups to underprivileged girls and women. Every period cup you purchase at Clicks means one free period cup is donated to a deserving girl.
For more information on how you can help, please click here.
Absolutely delighted that Nokuthula Mazibuko Msimang’s Daughters of Nandi published by Paivapo Publishers, with cover art and design from two of my favourite writers and artists Shubnum Khan and Megan Ross, typeset and copy edited by Clare Rose and printed by Britespark Communications made the Sunday Times longlist.
Congratulations to Nokuthula and thank you everyone who was part of the team that made this happen. Superstars.
Fiona Snyckers and Gail Schimmel are working writers – and their favourite people are writers. Their podcast is entitled “Hidden Lives of Writers” and they get into a dive deep into HOW and WHY successful writers write.
Zukiswa Wanner was featured on episode seven where she spoke about her journey starting with her first novel, The Madams, and spills the news that it is currently being translated into Portuguese for the Angolan, Mozambican, and Brazilian markets. Fiona tells Zuki that she has always regarded her as a super-connecter, especially across the African continent, and they reminisce about the early days of their careers. Gail and Zukiswa discuss how to raise good men in the current era of toxic masculinity and how Zuki’s book Men of the South was prophetic in many ways. Zukiswa describes how she came to curate the Artistic Encounters exhibition in Zurich, as well as the Afrolit online literary festivals. After the interview, Fiona and Gail are inspired to try to get their work into African countries, rather than just the Anglo-American markets.
You can listen to in on all of your favourite podcast platforms. Check out the Apple version by clicking here.
The Einstein Forum is a foundation of the German federal state of Brandenburg that serves the public as an open laboratory of the mind. Through a varied program of conferences, workshops, podium discussions, and lectures it brings together original thinkers from all over the world to test new ideas—and interrogate conventional ones—with a general audience. Topics span the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, ethics and politics. Whatever the subject, speakers are urged to think outside traditional academic boundaries. Our multidisciplinary emphasis encourages dialogue not only among experts from different fields but also, and just as importantly, between specialists and the public at large.
I gave a keynote address at the Einstein Forum conference which had the theme “Zeitenwenden. Thinking in Upheaval” which ran from Jun 29 – Saturday, Jul 1, 2023. My address was entitled, “Despite, In spite of, Sometimes to Spite Our Governments: How The COVID-19 Pandemic Opened Artists to Solidarities and Collaborations.”
Also at this event were Aleida Assmann, Rokhaya Diallo, J. Henry Fair, Ali Fathollah-Nejad, Carey Harrison, Stephen Holmes, Eva Illouz, Ivan Krastev, Harsh Mander, Thomas Meaney, Eva Menasse, Fintan O’Toole, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Carl Tham, David van Reybrouck and, James Wood.
You can watch the forum in full here; my speech runs from 12:52 minutes,
The Litafrika: Artistic Encounters II launched in Zurich, Switzerland on June 16, 2023.
“litafrika” is an open archive literary exhibition project in three parts (2022-2024) organised by Swiss partners Litar Foundation and Strauhof Zurich. It revolves around the central questions: “How do we read and narrate ‘Africa’ – a continent and its cultural diversity?” The exhibition trilogy follows a participatory process, where each edition will incorporate the themes and results from the previous edition to set a new focus. The project aims to be an intercontinental platform for a long-term dialogue with African and European authors, translators and publishers. Read more about the project by clicking here.
Here are some images from the launch
The Litafrika: Artistic Encounters II, curated by Zukiswa Wanner, will be hosted in Zurich, Switzerland from June 16 – September 3, 2023.
“litafrika” is an open archive literary exhibition project in three parts (2022-2024) organised by Swiss partners Litar Foundation and Strauhof Zurich. It revolves around the central questions: “How do we read and narrate ‘Africa’ – a continent and its cultural diversity?” The exhibition trilogy follows a participatory process, where each edition will incorporate the themes and results from the previous edition to set a new focus. The project aims to be an intercontinental platform for a long-term dialogue with African and European authors, translators and publishers.
The first exhibition, “Poetry of a Continent” from 3 June – 4 September 2022, was curated by Christa Baumberger and Rémi Jaccard, in dialogue with partners from Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and other countries. It set out to contextualise the European perspective on African literatures. The starting point was the monumental anthology Afrika im Gedicht (Zurich 2015) edited by Al Imfeld (1935–2017). The book covers the period from 1960 to 2014 and contains more than 550 poems from all parts of the African continent. Imfeld had a lasting influence on the promotion of African literatures in Switzerland over decades. His articles and appearances introduced countless writers from Africa to German-speaking readers and he helped set up a range of funding institutions. Although the anthology grew from a Eurocentric starting point, it was largely the writers themselves who selected the poems included.
The second exhibition “Soundscape Africa” in summer 2023 presenting current developments and tendencies curated by Zukiswa Wanner, kicks off on Saturday, June 16. Dubbed “Artistic Encounters” it aims to be an intercontinental platform for a long-term dialogue with African and European authors, translators and publishers. Wanner responds to the first part of the exhibition series with eight prose texts by contemporary authors. She shifts the emphasis from postcolonial poetry to contemporary novels to foreground the diverse stories of a younger generation of writers and artists. The featured artists are;
The exhibition launches on Saturday in Zurich with the following program;
Artistic Encounters
16 June – 3 September 2023
Venue: Strauhof Zurich
Vernissage 16 June Programme:
12:30pm – Welcome and guided tour by Zukiswa Wanner
5–6 pm – Welcome by Zukiswa Wanner (curator), Christa Baumberger (Litar) and Rémi Jaccard (Strauhof). Talk with the authors Virgília Ferrão (Mozambique) and Ondjaki (Angola, joining online), moderated by Zukiswa Wanner
6.30 pm – Guided tour by Zukiswa Wanner
For the full program please click here.
The University of East Anglia appointed Tsitsi Dangarembga the International Chair of Creative Writing in 2020 to deliver a program of literary events, classes and workshops. One of these workshops was an East African affair with writers from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda writing in English and Kiswahili run by Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jean McNeil, Zukiswa Wanner, and Elias Mutani in July 2022.
From this workshop, stories were whittled down and the best were put in a new Paivapo Publishers anthology The Heart Is A Bastard edited in English by Zukiswa Wanner. The Kiswahili version of this book edited by Elias Mutani is called Moyo ni Mwanaharamu. Those whose work feature are Fatma Shafii, Maureen Waithaka, Julius M Chiwaya, Joanita Kente Tushabe, Noella Moshi, Nyasili Atetwe, Ruth Nyadzua Mwangome, Sia Chami, Precious Colette Kemigisha, Gladwell Pemba, Jibril Adam, Misigo Daniel Mwanzu, and Charlie Muhumuza. The anthology launched at a ceremony at the Goethe-Institute on Saturday, May 27, 2023.