This year’s Macondo literary festival will take place between September 30 and October 2 at the Kenya National Theatre.
The festival is facilitated by the Macondo Book Society, a non-profit organization founded by Kenyan author Yvonne Owour and journalist Anja Bengelstorff to promote literature and authors of and from Africa beyond linguistic borders.
Macondo, a fictional place in the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Colombian Nobel Laureate Gabriel Marquez, is a place where magical things happen.
The motivation to come up a space where African languages can be celebrated in the form of storytelling was informed by attempts by the West to perpetuate the racist notion that European languages and culture are superior to African ones.
In examining the history, languages and culture of the Bantu people, Alexis Kagame, one of the most respected symbols of the African intelligentsia, noted that languages of the Bantu family are spoken in at least 19 African countries – including Kenya, of course.
African neo-colonial comprador bourgeoisie has facilitated the institutionalisation of imperial capitalist culture in the national memory. Since neo-colonialism thrives through slave consciousness, victims of colonialism increasingly use the Western culture as a measure of the validity of African languages.
The imperial KANU government destroyed Kamiriithu Community Educational and Cultural Centre – a theater center started by among others Ngugi wa Thiong’o – in 1977 because of its influence on the rising national consciousness, at that time.
The British Kenya National Theatre wasn’t started in 1952 because colonial settlers loved or cared about African history or the culture of its people. That cultural facility was only nominally established to foster improved race relations, as claimed by the colonial regime.
In substance, it was created to neutralise the growing national consciousness among Kenyans that was influenced by the emergence of African theater centers.
Through an avenue of their own, Africans found a platform through which to correctly reflect their lives, future, fears, hopes, dreams and history of struggle.
Lack of collective consciousness among Africans – particularly Africans living in Africa – can be ascribed to the legacy of imperial capitalism, colonialism and, in principle, the injustices of White hegemony under which we live.
As Congolese French philosopher Valentin-Yves Mudimbe brilliantly notes in the Invention of Africa: (a) each created essence in the universe is a force and an active force; (b) everything being force, each essence is thus always part of a multitude of other forces, and all of them influence each other; (c) every essence can always, under the influence of another essence, increase or decrease in its being, and (d) because each created being can weaken inferior beings or can be weaken by superior beings, each essence is always simultaneously an active and fragile force.
Only one who is ontologically superior is able to lord it over those considered to be inferior. Europe is considered developed – history of its development is a story for another day – whereas Africa is widely considered underdeveloped.
But it’s not enough to just say so. Europe acquired its fortune by violently exploiting African labour and resources. From the 16th to 18th century, European conquerors imported millions of Africans to work on their mines and plantations in the Americas.
The main reason why they chose Africa was because Africans had acquired a sort of genetic immunity to Malaria and Yellow Fever that were rampant in places such as Virginia. It didn’t take long before the ‘immunity superiority’ of Africans translated to social inferiority which ultimately defined the foundation on which racism would thrive.