Storymoja Festival

This year Nairobi's Storymoja festival (17-21 Sept) has special tributes to those who lost their lives in the Westgate Mall terrorist attack in September 2013, in particular to Ghana’s poet Kofi Awoonor who was a guest at the Storymoja festival when he was killed.

The top name on the festival's programme this year is Nigeria's Wole Soyinka, novelist, poet, playwright and the winner of Nobel prize for literature in 1986. Soyinka, a vocal critic of colonial rule and then military regimes both in his native Nigeria and other African countries, was forced to spend much time abroad, and only returned to his home country after the restoration of civilian rule in 1999. He will give the Wangari Maathai memorial lecture on 20 Sept.

The festival also includes master classes for young readers and writers, book launches, discussions on mythology and the new digital media, as well as film screenings. In particular there will be a screening and a workshop on Kenny Mann's documentary Severed Tree, Beautiful Roots (17-18 Sept) about the life of a European Jewish family that emigrated to Kenya in 1942 and how it survived under colonial rule, then during the Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s and afterwards in the new independent state.

Mann describes the inspiration for her film here.

Events take place at the Nairobi National Museum