About Us

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We are Nairobi’s literary festival connecting Africa’s histories and futures through literature. 

It’s mothership, the Macondo Book Society (MBS), was conceived in 2018 by novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and journalist Anja Bengelstorff as a literary, creative, intellectual and cultural endeavour inspired by the mythical town of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude —a place where reality and imagination seamlessly intertwine, much like our city Nairobi. MBS is a non-profit organization registered in Kenya.

We are the home of Global African literature.

The entrance of a stone building with a sign for the Macondo Literary Festival, featuring a green banner, stairs leading up to the door, and parked vehicles in front.

We conceptualize, develop and produce multi-disciplinary storytelling and literature-rooted platforms and networks - with the Macondo Literary Festival at the heart of our activities - in support of the Global African literary community. We stimulate and inspire conversations, connections and engagement for future-crafting and world-making as Africans and citizens of the world. We interrogate how historical narratives are constructed, contested, and reimagined through literature, challenging stereotypical perspectives and profiling energising ideas, visions and senses of the world. 

We are inspired by and deeply rooted in the energies of Nairobi.

Every festival asks: What does it mean to be African in this age and in the future? What does it mean for us to be human at this time? How do the literatures of Africa respond?

Advisory Board

A middle-aged man with glasses and a beard, wearing a black cap, a brown shirt, and a striped scarf, standing outdoors with autumn foliage in the background.

Godfrey „Gado“ Mwampembwa, born in Tanzania, is a graphic journalist and independent editorial cartoonist, animator and TV producer. His works have been published in The East African Standard and Daily Nation (Kenya), Le Monde and Courier International (France), Deutsche Welle (Germany), The Continent (Jo’burg), among others. He is the co-founder of Buni Media, an independent multi-media company based in Nairobi where he has been a creator and producer of the weekly satirical puppet show, The XYZ SHOW. Gado is a winner of Kenya National Human Rights Commission’s Lifetime Achievement Award In Journalism in 2018, among others. In 2011, he received a Visionaries Award from Ford Foundation for his innovative efforts on the frontlines of key social issues. In 2014 and 2016, Gado was named as one of the 100 most influential people in Africa by the NewAfrican. He is a 2024 STiAS (Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies) Fellow.

Gado joined the Macondo Book Society Advisory Board in 2023.

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Mshaï Mwangola is an oraturist / performance scholar who uses the lens of culture in her work as an academic, artist and activist. She is a storyteller who holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University (USA), a Masters of Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne (Australia) and a Bachelor of Education from Kenyatta University (Kenya).  Her intellectual work is characterised by her practice of performance as a way of making meaning for the purpose of research, pedagogy and advocacy, as is manifest in her current research project on the East African leso / kanga. A member of the Executive Committee of the Council of the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), she is a founder-director of The Orature Collective / The Performance Collective.

Mshai joined the Macondo Book Society Advisory Board in 2023.

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Indira Gopalakrishna is the CEO of Inclusivity Solutions, an inclusive insurtech enabling underserved African populations to access appropriate and affordable insurance. She spent two years living and working in Kenya as a fellow with the International Labour Organization. She brings to the Macondo Literary Festival Board experience in governing and scaling mission-driven organisations in African contexts, with an emphasis on financial sustainability, institutional partnerships, and long-term stewardship. She holds an MBA  and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

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Zulfikar Hirji (DPhil, Oxford; MPhil, Cambridge; BA, McGill) is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at York University Toronto (Canada). Despite being born in East Africa, it was during his studies at the University of Oxford that he began to fully appreciate the depth and reach of Coastal East Africa as the center of multiple global pasts and futures connected by land and water. He was struck by how absent these histories were in Western scholarship. Over several decades, his research has focussed on the movements and flows of people, ideas, and material things in historical and contemporary contexts. Sharing these stories with diverse audiences is central to his scholarly work.

Zulfikar joined the Macondo Book Society Advisory Board in 2024.

Ahmed Aidarus is the founder of Jahazi Press, an indie publisher of literary fiction and nonfiction in Kenya.  He also manages Prestige Bookshop, the oldest bookstore in Nairobi. With Jahazi Press, he focuses on buying book rights of Kenyan authors from their Western publishers while cultivating a new generation of emerging literary voices through new publications such as Let Us Conspire and Other Stories (2024). In 2025, he curated Alliance Française’s NYrobi Book Festival and the Kenya Writes segment of the Macondo Literary Festival 2025.

Ahmed joined the Macondo Book Society Advisory Board in 2025.