Nigerian publisher to curate African festival in Germany

Co-founder and publishing director of Cassava Republic, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, will be curating the 2019 Stimmen Afrikas Festival in Germany, Voices of Africa in English, to mark its The event, themed ‘Crossing Borders: Translate – Transpose – Communicate’, and scheduled to take place from November 6 to 9, was founded to enable the people of Germany […]

Co-founder and publishing director of Cassava Republic, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, will be curating the 2019 Stimmen Afrikas Festival in Germany, Voices of Africa in English, to mark its The event, themed ‘Crossing Borders: Translate – Transpose – Communicate’, and scheduled to take place from November 6 to 9, was founded to enable the people of Germany know more about the poets, novelists and authors from Africa. The event, themed ‘Crossing Borders: Translate – Transpose – Communicate’, will be held in the city of Cologne, from November.

Over forty authors and translators are expected at the festival, which will feature readings, lectures, discussions, workshops, and music performances. Some of them include Mukoma wa Ngugi, Zukiswa Wanner, Boubakar Boris Diop, Susan Kiguli, and Paul Bandia.

Long before the call for more diversity in Germany’s cultural institutions, in 2009, literary historian Christa Morgenrath launched the Literary Festival Stimmen Afrikas in the city of Cologne. The first literary reading took place in the spring of that year with literature from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since then, more than a hundred authors from almost forty different countries have travelled to Cologne to read from their works and engage in

discussions with the audience.

In 2017, the festival’s initiators published the first and only German translation of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’o’s ‘Decolonizing the Mind’, and this year, to mark the festival’s 10th anniversary, an anthology entitled ‘Imagine Africa 2060’ has been published. The book contains ten short stories by ten African/African Diasporan authors who share their visions on the continent’s future.