Abdulrahman ‘Abu Amirah’ Ndegwa is a Mombasa-based writer, AMLA (Art Managers & Literary Activists) Fellow, AWT (African writers Trust) Publishing Fellow, founding editor of Hekaya Initiative, a literary & cultural production platform publishing voices from the Swahili Coast, convener of the annual Swahili Literary Festival and proprietor of HAI Book Hub– Hekaya’s publishing imprint and bookstore. His story “Swahilification of Mutembei” was shortlisted for Writivism Short Story prize in 2016.
Kelsey McFaul is part of the editorial staff at Two Lines Press. She has a PhD in literature from UC Santa Cruz with a focus in African language literatures. She first joined Two Lines as a Public Fellow in 2020-21, supporting the creation of No Edges: Swahili Stories.
As Primo Levi’s book is becoming available to Swahili readers, we would like to welcome on these pages news about Swahili literature, translation, book publishing and literary festivals. This interview was published by the Center for the Art of Translation.
A conversation about literary culture and translation on the East African coast.
In March 2022, Abu Amirah organized the fourth annual Swahili Literature Festival in Mombasa, Kenya. The festival celebrates Swahili literature’s long literary heritage and encourages its new writers and readers. This spring, we sat down with Amirah to talk about the festival, his love of Swahili literature, and his plans for the future.
Kelsey McFaul: Congratulations on a wonderful festival, and thanks so much for making the time for this conversation! The festival began in 2019 and its fourth edition, which had the theme Building an Archival Culture, wrapped up earlier this spring. What were your vision and aims for the festival when you first launched it? How have you seen it grow and evolve over time?
Abu Amirah: It has been a wonderful four years curating the festival and the raw palpable fear I had in the first edition has never really dissipated! Believe this, this fourth edition was the first one I truly enjoyed because I was able to attend all the sessions.
There has been a lot of learning and relearning over the years, thinking and rethinking, because the festival has its own incredible way of surprising us each year. Initially we envisioned it as a cultural celebratory platform glorifying excellence in different literary forms (prose, poetry and play), but as we have seen in the last two installments (2021 and 2022), the art of literary translation is slowly assuming a key place. Plans are already in place to have a series of literary translation workshops for content creators in the East African coast in the future. This shift to and emphasis on literary translation, as I have come to appreciate, is informed by the history of the Swahili coast, including the dynamics of linguistic interaction between foreign traders who sailed in with the monsoon winds and natives who could not speak the language. This interaction made translators an important aspect of how these coastal port cities, communities and linguistic diversity took shape.
Archival Culture was the overriding theme of the 2022 edition, and this was necessitated by conversations we had at a Mozilla Foundation brunch in Kilifi and pre-festival conversations we had with a bunch of archivists. The bunch had fine artists, historians, researchers, food archivists, photographers and cultural activists; it was evident that we were all taking different approaches but the end was similar, the need to archive our culture. We felt it would be great if we had sessions that could enrich this conversation on Archival Culture and get us all on the same boat.
KM: You mentioned that translation has been a topic of conversation at both the 2021 and 2022 festivals. How do you personally think about translation in the context of Swahili literature?
Wema Hawajazaliwa [The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born], by Ayi Kwei Armah and translated into Swahili by Abdilatif Abdalla
AA: In the context of Swahili literature, I see translation as a terrific way of opening the Swahili coast for more literary scrutiny and exchanges. Translation projects also help our space to have broader conversations with languages like Arabic, English, Portuguese, and German that have influenced Kiswahili in different ways and also enhanced the multilingual nature of the Swahili coast. It is refreshing to see contemporary writers read, critique, and translate each other’s works, like in the case of Fatma Shaffie and Hassan Kassim at this year’s festival, and also iconic writers like Mwalimu Abdilatif’s translation of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born into Kiswahili, a text I am ashamed to say I haven’t read yet. I am eagerly anticipating a translation of Abdilatif’s Sauti Ya Dhiki into the English language which (I am told) should be out later in the year.
But this example of having not read Abdilatif’s translation is rather sad, and it brings up many questions about why most of us are yet to interact with the text. Whose fault is it? Everyone? Book sellers? Publishing houses? The market? Our reading attitudes shaped by Western literature?
Thinking about Kiswahili’s adoption as an official language of the African Union and the first African indigenous language to be designated an international day by UNESCO, I see it as a tool that can mediate between other indigenous languages in spaces where it is spoken. Recently I’ve encountered Kiswahili dialects like Kiunguja, Kiamu, Kimvita, Kimrima, and Kimakunduchi in a very intriguing perspective through various projects. The dialects demand articulation and attention, as they rightfully should, even more than standardized Kiswahili. I would like to see translation in and from Kiswahili dialects and also a way where more translations in other African indigenous languages can be done with Kiswahili as the mediating language.
KM: The Swahili Lit Festival is organized by Hekaya Arts Initiative, which you also run. What was the inspiration for Hekaya? In addition to the festival, what other projects is Hekaya involved in?
AA: The story behind the creation of Hekaya (loosely translated to ‘narrative’) is a long one. The abbreviated version is this: in 2015, Kwani? did a creative writing workshop in Mombasa facilitated by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Billy Kahora. [Yvonne’s novel] Dust really shaped my writing journey from that moment; I delved deeper into creative writing because Odidi ran! Right after, we decided–as the entire bunch of participants, a dozen of us–to form a collective which we aptly named Tendi (this can be loosely translated as ‘creative’ or ‘creativity’). It died somewhat tragically after it was hijacked by a Chinese porn site. The name I had suggested as we were brainstorming was Hekaya, and as it became harder to pick up after the hijack, I started Hekaya Arts initiative, which was initially supposed to take over where Tendi had left off.
Hekaya’s mobile bookstore
The inspiration was the need to create a platform for coastal stories and also to have more writers in regional writing prizes like Writivism, Short Story Day Africa, and others. It felt rather lonesome being the only coastal writer at Writivism 2016.
As far as projects go, the festival has been our most enduring one. We also run an annual spelling bee competition which was hugely impacted by the COVID-19 school lockdowns and the entire change in the school academic year. We plan to resume in September 2022. We also run reading programs with a school in Kilifi County, another one with home-schooled kids in Mombasa, and a book exchange program. And of course there is our online bookstore which has become mobile lately, as we sell books in a three-wheeler (TukTuk).
KM: What projects and plans are you looking forward to in the future?
AA: It would be great to further the festival in other coastal spaces beyond Kenya like Mayotte, Comoros, Zanzibar and Pemba. Beyond that, I’ve been obsessing on ways to make Kiswahili literature readily available to school kids, with a plan to increase Kiswahili readership from a young age. This is still in its conceptual stages and I am certain you’ll be among the first of my friends to know about it once the concept has grown some legs.
Currently we are also working on putting together our first creative writing and translation workshop. We have collaborated with Mozilla Foundation in curating a series of short story competitions for Kiswahili writers. The first one that ended early May surprised us because the quality of work we received was absolutely amazing. Top notch, I tell you! This gives us so much hope that indeed putting together a workshop for these writers will also help them improve their approach to craft and churn out some really good and solid Kiswahili work.
