Africa Forward Fest goes beyond the literary festival format

This week, Nairobi is not just hosting a festival, it is staging a conversation about the future of African storytelling.

From 7 to 9 May, the Alliance Française de Nairobi will host the fifth edition of Africa Forward Fest, now expanded into a pan-African platform that brings together writers, publishers, translators, and cultural thinkers from across the continent. Timed ahead of the Africa Forward Summit, the festival arrives with a clear sense of intent: To move beyond celebration and into the harder work of connection, circulation, and influence.

For a city that has long been central to the region’s literary life, this moment feels less like an arrival and more like recognition. Nairobi has built its cultural weight quietly through readings, workshops, book clubs, and institutional spaces that continue to hold the ecosystem together. 

Few spaces embody that continuity more than the Alliance Française. For decades, it has functioned as a cultural anchor in not just hosting events, but sustaining relationships between writers and audiences, between emerging voices and established ones, between local practice and international exchange. That the festival unfolds here is not incidental. It reflects a longer history of investment in literary and artistic life that has made Nairobi a meeting point for ideas.

A festival asking how stories move

At its core, Africa Forward Fest is organised around a persistent question: How do African stories travel across languages, borders and readerships?

There is no shortage of literary output on the continent, but what remains uneven is how that work circulates, who gets access to it, how it is translated, and whether it can move beyond national or linguistic silos. The festival places these tensions at the centre of its programming, treating translation not simply as a technical exercise, but as a cultural and political act.

The programme brings together a formidable line-up of thinkers and writers, including Achille Mbembe, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, David Maillu, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, and Peter Kimani–voices whose work sits at the intersection of literature, history, and political thought.

They are joined by practitioners shaping the movement of texts across borders, including Edwige Dro, as well as emerging and established authors from across Africa and the diaspora.

As Will Clurman, CEO of eKitabu,  notes, the issue is not a lack of stories, but what happens to them after they are written.

 “For that momentum to translate into real impact, those stories need to move across borders, across languages, and into the hands of more readers.” As a partner in the festival, eKitabu is supporting that movement through its programming: from publisher roundtables and translation-focused sessions to direct engagement with young readers and book communities.

From page to stage and back again

One of the festival’s most anticipated moments sits slightly outside the conventional panel format. After 4:30, the seminal work by David G. Maillu returns not as a book launch, but as a theatrical production. More than 50 years after its publication, the text is being reintroduced for the second time through performance, a shift that speaks to how African literature is being revisited and reinterpreted for contemporary audiences.

The production, to be staged across multiple dates in May on 8-9 and 15-17, reflects a broader movement to bring literary works into spaces where stories are not only read, but watched, heard, and collectively experienced.

It also raises a quieter, more uncomfortable question: What does it mean to support storytelling in practice?

Kenyans have long shown an appetite for stories. The challenge has often been whether that enthusiasm extends to the people who create them. Theatre, in this context, becomes more than adaptation but a test of presence—of whether audiences are willing to show up, not just in principle, but in person.

Alongside this revival is a renewed focus on translation, including attention to works such as Flesh, also by Maillu, and broader conversations about how texts move across languages without losing their cultural weight.

Where literature meets political memory

Some of the festival’s most urgent conversations move beyond literature as an isolated practice and into its relationship with history and power.

On 8 May, a Books in Africa–curated session titled “Blood Debts: Can the Past Be Paid?” brings generational memory into sharp focus. It asks a question that continues to surface across the continent: What is owed, and who is accountable?

The timing is difficult to ignore. Across East Africa and beyond, questions of governance, historical injustice, and political legitimacy remain unresolved. Rwanda continues its Kwibuka commemoration period. In neighbouring countries Tanzania and Uganda, young people have mobilised around elections and democratic accountability, often confronting systems that remain resistant to change. This is the context in which the conversation sits. It is not framed as distant history, but as a present, lived tension,  one that shapes how younger generations understand both inheritance and responsibility. As part of the festival, it signals a shift in tone: Literature here is not retreating from politics, but engaging it directly.

Building beyond the moment

What distinguishes Africa Forward Fest is not just the breadth of its programme, but its attempt to extend beyond the event itself.

Alongside public sessions, the festival functions as a professional platform, creating space for publishers, translators, educators, and cultural institutions to form partnerships that outlast the three days. Pitch sessions, cross-border collaborations, and industry roundtables are built into the structure, reflecting a recognition that visibility alone is not enough.

A key highlight in this regard is the second edition of the Prix de l’édition jeunesse africaine (PEJA), which recognises excellence in French-language children’s publishing while working to bridge Francophone and Anglophone literary spaces. In a landscape where language continues to shape access and distribution, such initiatives carry both symbolic and practical weight.

Why it matters now

Festivals often gather people. Fewer manage to shift how an industry thinks about itself. Africa Forward Fest is clearly attempting the latter. By placing translation, circulation, and cross-border exchange at the centre of its programme, it is engaging with the structural questions that continue to define African publishing. By anchoring itself in Nairobi, it draws on a city that has long done the work, even when it was not always visible. And by opening its doors to readers, students, policymakers, and practitioners, it refuses to keep those conversations closed.

Across the week, there will be books, performances, debates, and encounters. There will be moments of celebration, but also friction, the kind that comes when ideas are taken seriously.

What remains is the invitation.

To be in the room. To listen. To argue. To connect. Because if the question is how African stories move, then part of the answer begins here in Nairobi at the Africa Forward Fest.

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Tracy Ochieng is a staff writer with Books in Africa. Email: tracy.ochieng@ekitabu.com