In 2012, two young Ugandans and a Zimbabwean founded the Centre for African Cultural Excellence (CACE), with the aim of promoting African ideas through the arts and culture. Drawn together by a shared interest in the power of literature and storytelling as a means of expression and a mode of engaging with contemporary realities, CACE’s work started with the Writivism Literary Initiative. Writivism’s mission has always focused on the everyday experience of young Africans living on the continent today, explored imaginatively through fiction. Whilst Writivism initially focussed on young writers living in Uganda, in 2014 it expanded its scope to reach emerging writers living anywhere on the African continent. In 2017, the initiative celebrated its fifth anniversary.
To celebrate Writivism’s fifth anniversary, the University of Bristol partnered with CACE to develop a special anthology project, which seeks to bring together new voices from Uganda’s diverse youth populations. Based on two workshops held in Kampala and Gulu in July 2017, the anthology also comes out of the desire to showcase the kinds of stories young people across Uganda are interested in telling and to offer opportunities for imagining other lives and other minds.
The aim, in developing this anthology, was to give emerging Ugandan writers and youth – some of whom had never even written a full short story before, let alone published one – a platform to develop their own creative voice. The writers collected in this anthology range from eighteen to thirty five years old, coming from all manner of backgrounds and contexts. The anthology interrogates the theme of conflict. In so doing, the wish was not to contribute to the tendency, particularly in the Western media and press, to view Africa generally, and Uganda specifically, as a site of violence; rather, we wanted to show how emerging Ugandan writers engage with conflict, in the fullest sense of the word, as a theme, but also as a literary element that drives a story and advances a plot.
In this presentation, I introduce the anthology, reflect on its development and the process of collaboration via the Global Challenges Research Fund, and position the anthology within a longer tradition of Ugandan writing.