Our inaugural edition took place in 2021, and the theme “Writing African Cities” marked a momentous occasion: the 90th anniversary of Nairobi’s oldest library, the iconic McMillan Memorial Library. We explored the city’s rich tapestry of narratives and ideas, spanning 90 years of the library’s legacy and a century of Nairobi’s existence.
Throughout this edition, we delved into the fascinating realm of reimagining spaces with contested colonial and other histories, exemplified by the McMillan Memorial Library. We engaged collective imagination to uncover new perspectives and insights while honouring the library’s storied past.
Media
2023
The NBO Litfest 2023 edition theme, Mtaa Narratives, was a call to explore cultural memory and the stories that ground us. Mtaa being kitongoji, neighbourhood, baze, hood, home; how do we negotiate distance from and proximity to our roots? What do we foreground? are there inflexible ideas about a place?
This edition started finding its answers by curating a programme across all three of Book Bunk’s project libraries; each a colonial building re-engineered to serve their immediate communities as the primary audiences.
A celebration of Mtaa Narratives recognized the importance of place in its complex plurality.