The third edition of the Kampala Writes Literature Festival (LitFest) was held from August 28 to 30, 2026, at the Uganda National Cultural Centre (The National Theatre) main auditorium in Kampala, under the theme: ‘Where Stories Begin: The Imaginary and the Art of Possibility.’
The festival was organised by the Goethe-Zentrum Kampala/Ugandan German Cultural Society, with the support of its partners, the German Embassy, Caine Prize for African Writing, African Writers Trust and Jibu Water. It was curated by award-winning Ugandan author Goretti Kyomuhendo.
The festival featured masterclasses and workshops, panel discussions, book launches, a roundtable conversation, author interviews, book talks, interactive dialogues, spoken-word performances, a dedicated children’s session, film screenings and a music concert.
It attracted leading writers from the continent and the diaspora. According to Kyomuhendo, 11 of the 52 speakers were guests from different parts of the world. The festival also featured established and emerging talent across various art forms.
The book market exhibition featured Mahiri Books, Femrite, eKitabu, Malaika Reading Spaces, Ibua Publishing, Tubaze African Books and Qweshunga Book Bar.
Kyomuhendo said this year’s theme invited writers to reflect on the origins of storytelling, how new ideas are born, and how imagination allows people to rethink their histories and envision alternative futures.
‘Storytelling has always been at the heart of who we are as Ugandans, of who we are as Africans. Many of us grew up surrounded by folktales, praise, poetry, drama, song and dance as forms of entertainment and instruction.
‘As storytellers, we continue to honour these long-standing traditions, but also boldly embrace new genres and modes of expression. This festival celebrates all artists as the powerful narrators of our stories, and brings together a community of writers, poets and thinkers to expand the boundaries of storytelling,’ Kyomuhendo added.
Kyomuhendo argued that before magical realism was popularised, or even given a vocabulary, African storytellers were already practising it.
‘…So, for us as African writers, as African creatives, the spirit world was what shaped our everyday realities. It was never foreign. Magic was part of our everyday life. But for the longest time, African stories have been told through others’ lens.’
‘Africa’s stories have been boxed to fit into stereotypes of despair and suffering. African stories have been marginalised. African stories have been gatekept. Stories influence perceptions. Stories preserve and archive our history. Stories inspire generations. Stories determine how the people are identified and remembered. That’s how important stories are…’ she said.
Chika Unigwe on sustaining a writing practice
The keynote conversation centred on the story of acclaimed Belgian-Nigerian novelist and professor of creative writing Chika Unigwe and what it means to sustain a writing practice over time. Unigwe was in conversation with writer, researcher and educationist Anna Adima.
Born in Enugu, Nigeria, Unigwe now lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children.
Her novels include On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Night Dancer (2012), Black Messiah (2014), The Middle Daughter (2023) and Grace (2026).
Unigwe said her stories can begin anywhere.
‘…I carry a notebook everywhere. I love airport lounges, and I love airports, because when people are at airports, they tend to forget that they are in public. And they have really loud conversations, right?
‘So, it’s very interesting to sort of get these one-sided conversations that people are having, sometimes about the most intimate stuff. And so, I just sort of fill my notebook.’
She added: ‘…So, my stories come from everywhere. There are things I hear people say. There are things that sort of haunt me. I think about the novels that I’ve written over many years. And the fact that I tend to sort of circle around the same things.
‘And I think that’s because you can’t be a woman. You can’t be a black woman in certain spaces. And you can’t be a black woman who thinks and who’s observant and not be haunted by things. So, certain things haunt me, and I have to write them as well.’
Unigwe said place and setting are key in shaping stories.
‘I tell my students, like, your setting cannot be black and Jewish. The way a person moves or navigates a certain space is not the same way they’ll navigate other spaces.
‘For example, the decisions that my protagonists take come from the facts that they are in, that space that they’re in. If they lived elsewhere, with different obligations and different duties, they might take different decisions…’
‘So, setting influences the decisions that my protagonists take. But it also influences the consequences of those decisions…’
Asked if she had ever written a story set in a place she had not visited, Unigwe replied: ‘No, I couldn’t do that. That is why I find it very difficult to write speculative fiction.
‘I have to know a place well. And see a place well. And understand a place. To be able to set a story in that place. So, my imagination isn’t as developed as to set a story in a place that I’ve never been to. I couldn’t do research just by reading about a place. I want to be able to smell the place.’
The writer says family is the first place where stories are told, even if one does not have siblings. It is the place where your sense of self is shaped.
‘You have people who say, you know, 30 years later, ‘I was traumatised by what my father did to me.’ ‘I was traumatised by what my mother did to me…”
She added: ‘So, family is the first place where you learn to think of yourself.’
‘I think that the way I navigate the world and the way that I think of myself, right, is because of who I am in my family, right? But, yeah, and I don’t think I’ve ever written a story where someone is a lonely child…’
Speculative fiction as a tool for political imagination
Ugandan writer, filmmaker and publisher Dilman Dila, German-Cameroonian author, curator and theatre maker Mirrianne Mahn, and award-winning South African actor and playwright Philisiwe Twijnstra explored speculative fiction as a tool for political imagination, asking what happens when African writers reclaim the right to imagine the future.
The panel, ‘Speculative Futures – Science Fiction as Fantasy and Political Imagination’, moderated by Kenyan editor, journalist and literary facilitator Otieno Owino, considered speculative genres as an important space for political thought, where the assumptions of the present can be entirely rewritten.
Dila said his 2026 science fiction solarpunk novella, The Blossoming of the Big Tree, published by Ododo Press, revolves around Adita, a 70-year-old woman who is anxious around people and struggles to fit in because her village has a tight sense of community.
To avoid coming across as anti-social, she agrees to chair the committee for national defence because it is easier for her to interact with other people through work. The job is simple, requiring her to coordinate responses to the climate crisis, until a superpower attacks to steal the technology that makes her country a solarpunk utopia.
Her nation is a loose union of hundreds of thousands of self-sufficient villages. It has no army or weapons, so how will Adita coordinate their defence? Will the invasion lead to the disintegration of their utopia, or will they find a way to defeat the coloniser?
According to Dila, solarpunk is an opposition to popular genres, especially the dystopian genre that dominates popular media.
‘Solarpunk is kind of an opposition and it is trying to imagine a better future. …where there’s no dictatorship, no poverty, capitalism, and everybody agrees because there’s no central government, it is a decentralised world; there are no politicians; there are no elections.’
Dila said Adita likes being alone but has to live in a world where there is a tight-knit community.
‘…people are always in her space, because they are neighbours, so they help each other, they don’t leave anybody struggling. And so, she’s struggling to fit in in this kind of world. She also happens to chair the National Committee for Defence…’
‘And so, there is a technology that they use to make their world really worth living in, without capitalism, without a central government, but it is the technology that gives them limitless energy, and makes it possible for any villager to manufacture anything they want, whether it’s a smartphone, a TV or a car. You don’t need to go to a factory; you do it in your backyard,’ he added.
Dila says every good story has a villain who, in this case, invades the country because he wants to steal its technology.
‘And so, this old woman finds herself trying to figure out how to defend the country. …They don’t have weapons, but they have to defend themselves against a heavy-armed invader.’
Twijnstra’s collection of short stories, Flying Cows and Other Traumas, published by Jacana Media, explores magical realism, speculative fiction and fantasy. Twijnstra portrays women succeeding in the face of brutality. The protagonists – Black women – are thrust into magical, terrifying and spellbinding worlds, with stories set in the past, present and future.
She says her collection consists of stories about women struggling to fit into society.
‘Firstly, I was raised by these kinds of women. …Women that had to, behind closed doors and walls, had to take care of a home…’
‘And I find that they were more human than those who are in the centre. And they were on the margin, but they were able to watch what’s happening in the centre. And they see all the cracks that the centre cannot actually see.
‘And then they became interested. I always think about how intelligent the drunken man was next door. How much of stories they had, how much of a wisdom they had,’ Twijnstra added.
She added that as a black woman, she carries her body and it introduces her to the world that has not accepted her.
‘And these characters, sometimes I tend to be emotional…So, sometimes I see how the world is not as, you know and there’s so much that I want to say that I don’t have words for. Thus, I use literature and theatre to do that.’
Meanwhile, Mirrianne Mahn’s debut novel, Issa (Rowohlt, 2024), spans four generations of women across Cameroon and Germany. She weaves together the fate of five women whose lives span more than a century and are connected by the lines of colonial exploitation and the pursuit of self-determination.
Issa does not really want to embark on this journey. Pregnant, she sits on a plane to Douala, driven by her mother’s fear for her daughter’s life during childbirth.
In Cameroon, the land of her childhood, she is supposed to follow the healing path of rituals under the watchful eyes of her grandmothers. However, it is not that simple when you are considered too Black in Frankfurt and too German in Buea.
The visit becomes a confrontation for Issa with her own family history and the certainty that both trauma and the unwavering will to love and live are inheritable.
‘…to centre a black woman in my literature and then centre a black African woman in my literature is such a powerful political decision in my writing. And it’s such a way of resistance, because we love telling stories about struggle, about oppression, but we barely and rarely tell the stories about the resistance,’ Mahn said.
Adding: ‘And I don’t mean the resistance of a Winnie Mandela, who is like loud and proud and shouting about her husband in jail. I am talking about the resistance of the everyday woman who chooses to love the child of her rapist, who chooses to lend her neighbouring woman a hand even though she barely has anything, who chooses to divide the little rice she has into four portions so everyone can have something.’
‘That is political resistance in a world that oppresses you, and where your bare existence is a form of revolution because this world was not built for you and me to sit on a stage with a microphone. So, that’s a political resistance,’ Mahn further added.
Storytelling and impressionist performances
Lloyd Lutara and Anna Grace Awilli opened the festival with storytelling and impressionist performances.
Lutara’s My Feet Are All I Have Left, is an original musical composition that draws loosely on Okot p’Bitek’s 1953 novel Lak Tar (White Teeth) and the Acholi proverb at its root: Lak Tar Miyo Kinyero We Lobo – ‘Our teeth are white and so we laugh at the world.’ The music was by Unravel Me Gently.
Neither a music album nor a lecture, the piece grew out of a long period spent living inside p’Bitek’s lesser-known writing – Lak Tar, Two Songs: Song of a Prisoner, and Song of a Malaya, his rejected master’s thesis, Oral Literature and Its Social Background among the Acholi and Lango – alongside the work of Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu, Lubwa P’Chong, Pio Zirimu, Kalundi Serumaga and the early African run of Transition magazine, Lutara said.
He added that it is a contemporary addition to a particular literary lineage – the dance and song of the Lwo, the epic poetry of p’Bitek and the performance literature of the great post-colonial literary minds Uganda has largely forgotten.
Awilli recited ‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ by imitating English, Acholi, French, Runyankole and Indian accents, sending the audience into laughter.
The famous line ‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ is spoken by Juliet in Act 2, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Art installation
On display at the reception of the National Theatre was a large art installation by Ugandan visual and performing artivist Sandra Suubi titled Samba Gown-era. It was a physical and visual counterpoint to the festival’s spoken and written word, imagining and re-enacting the Ugandan Independence ceremony of 1962 as a wedding ceremony.
The installation offered a different experience for attendees to engage with at their own pace.
Samba Gown-era is a performance/wearable installation featuring a gown made from waste plastic that can be worn. It underscores the problem of plastic waste in Uganda and the role of women in cleaning up this waste.
Women make up 80 per cent of the informal waste-picking and collecting sector in Uganda, while also carrying out different forms of unpaid domestic labour.
This toxic marriage with consumerism, and the difficulty of escaping it, alludes to environmental pollution and exploitation, as well as the inequitable relations that persist in contemporary society.