Table of Contents
KAMPALA, UGANDA — After a full day of panels, BookTalks and prize-season arguments at the National Theatre, Nairobi-based publisher eKitabu pulled a smaller circle of writers, editors and publishers up Nakasero Hill on Saturday night, 29 August 2026, for an exclusive cocktail reception at Onomo Hotel that turned the value of the African book into dinner conversation.
The invitation was spare and deliberate. One guest. 20:00 to 22:30. Artists, publishers and distinguished authors only. No gate-crashing, no open mic, no festival crush. The stated purpose was industry collaboration and literary excellence. What unfolded on Akii Bua Road was quieter than the Yusuf Lule years of this festival and more intimate than the public programme still running at the Uganda National Cultural Centre: a chilled Saturday evening of music, plates, and the kind of talk that only starts once the microphones are off.
Kampala Edge Times was in the room. While the larger party stayed with dinner and easy conversation, eKitabu opened a side corridor for physical interviews with some of the writers who had spent the weekend on its stand and on the LitFest stage. Those conversations — with Donica Merhazion, Tramaine Suubi, Betty Kilonzo, Chika Unigwe and Sheila Akwany of Kampala Writes — are the spine of this report.
What was the eKitabu cocktail party and why was it held in Kampala?
eKitabu did not fly into Kampala for a single toast. The cocktail sat inside a three-day occupation of the city’s literary calendar.
Kampala Writes LitFest, now in its third edition, ran from Friday 28 to Sunday 30 August at the National Theatre under the theme “Where Stories Begin: The Imaginary and the Art of Possibility.” The festival is organised by the Uganda German Cultural Society / Goethe-Zentrum Kampala, curated by Goretti Kyomuhendo, and backed this year by partners including the German Embassy, the Caine Prize for African Writing, African Writers Trust and Jibu Water. New Vision’s day-one count put the programme at 52 speakers, 11 of them from outside Uganda, across 12 panels, workshops, masterclasses and author interviews.
eKitabu planted a working stand inside that festival. In the days before the weekend, the publisher told readers to find Betty Kilonzo of Blackstartales, performers and booksellers at the stand, and to catch Donica Merhazion and Deborah Tendo Auko on Saturday and Sunday. On Friday afternoon it had already recorded a live Off the Bookshelf session at Dancing Cup in Bugolobi with Tendo and Kilonzo. The Saturday night reception at Onomo was the closed-door counterpart: a thank-you and a working dinner for the people who had spent the day selling, signing, arguing and reading in public.
The first Kampala Writes LitFest, in 2024, was itself held at Onomo Hotel. Returning to the same Nakasero address two years later, this time for a publisher’s private reception rather than the main festival, closed a small circle in the city’s still-young festival geography.
How did Saturday 29 August move from the National Theatre to Nakasero?
Saturday at UNCC was not a gentle warm-up. New Vision’s day-two report described a “fiery and at times explosive” programme. In the morning, Joshua Lubwama, Yvonne Kusiima and Zabu Wamara sat on a panel about what literary prizes actually do to a writer’s life. Later, an all-women conversation on “The Imagination Gap: Who Gets to Imagine the Future?” put Chika Unigwe on stage with Edna Ninsiima, Ghanaian publisher Ama Dadson and Cameroonian-German writer Mirrianne Mahn, moderated by Kenyan novelist Wanjiru Koinange.
Dr Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka read from Walking with Gorillas. Deborah Tendo, Kenyan with a Ugandan father and author of the Mvua Press title Rough Silk, read on father-daughter terrain. Evelyn Amony spoke, through an interpreter, about I Am Evelyn Amony and eleven years inside Joseph Kony’s war. Late afternoon, Donica Merhazion and Tramaine Suubi shared a BookTalk moderated by Phillip Matogo.
By the time guests began peeling away from the Theatre toward Nakasero, the day had already done the heavy lifting: trauma as source material, prizes as mixed blessing, imagination as a political question. The cocktail was not another panel. It was the after.
Onomo Hotel sits at 18A Akii Bua Road, on Nakasero Hill, a short climb from the ministries, embassies and the old city centre. Opened in 2021, the house is built for this kind of evening — 114 rooms, a terrace restaurant, pool light on the courtyard, Afro-fusion plates, and enough quiet corners that a journalist can pull five people out of a reception without emptying the room.
Guests started arriving after 8:00pm. The invite said 20:00; on the ground the night found its feet closer to 8:30, the Kampala hour when traffic finally loosens and people who have been on a stage since morning remember they have not eaten. The weather held. Nakasero in late August can turn without warning; this Saturday stayed kind. Music played at conversation volume. People who had spent the afternoon under festival lighting now stood with glasses and talked about the books on the table the way traders talk about a harvest — what moved, what stalled, who is still waiting for a distributor who will treat an African novel as more than a seasonal display.
The room was East African first and continental by design. Uganda was the host. Kenya came in force through eKitabu’s own list. Ethiopia and Eritrea arrived in the person and the subject of Donica Merhazion. The United States sat in the double lives of writers who publish in New York and still answer to Kampala and Nairobi. Chika Unigwe brought Nigeria, Belgium and Georgia into the same sentence. That mix is not a branding slide. It is how African literature actually travels in 2026: by night flight, by imprint, by a festival that can put a Nairobi publisher and a Kampala curator in the same hotel.
Who is eKitabu and why does a Nairobi house throw a party in Kampala?
eKitabu was founded in Nairobi in 2012. Kitabu is Swahili for book. The company began as a digital distributor for African educational content — the workhorse of the continental industry, still roughly 70 percent of what African publishers produce — and built an open system that could take a title from a local house onto phones and into classrooms, paid for with mobile money. From that base it moved into accessible formats, including African sign languages and braille, and into the slower, riskier business of trade literature.
Mvua Press, the adult imprint, launched in November 2024, just before Nairobi’s Macondo Literature Festival, with a workshop for aspiring authors and Scholastica Moraa’s When Love Says Goodbye as the first title. A year later the list stood at five books and a bestseller problem that East African trade publishers are not supposed to have: Empress Ciku Kimani-Mwaniki’s NaiRobbery Cocktail pushing toward 2,000 copies in twelve months.
The house added audiobooks through its in-house Studio KSL, which took a Digital Publishing Innovation Award at Frankfurt, and began selling translation rights — including an Italian edition of Moraa’s debut. Children’s imprint Maua Books followed. Co-founder and CEO Will Clurman has spent more than a decade arguing that the next global African bestseller has to work in Africa first.
| Mvua Press title | Author | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| When Love Says Goodbye | Scholastica Moraa | Debut poetry collection that opened the imprint |
| The Unpaid Bride Price | Emmanuel Ngwainmbi | Early list fiction |
| NaiRobbery Cocktail | Empress Ciku Kimani-Mwaniki | Crime thriller; imprint’s sales leader |
| After 4.30 | David G. Maillu | Later adapted for the stage in Nairobi |
| Househelp Manual | Betty Kilonzo | Practical and literary guide from a consulting editor at the house |
| Rough Silk | Deborah Auko Tendo | Father-daughter novel; read in Kampala this weekend |
| Born at the End of the World | Donica Merhazion | Historical novel, co-published with Catalyst Press in the US |
That table is why eKitabu was not a tourist at LitFest. It had books on the stand, authors on the programme, and a commercial argument: African readers will buy African books if the object is designed, edited, priced and distributed like a serious product.
Which writers did Kampala Edge Times sit with at Onomo?
The reception never pretended to be a press conference. People ate. They listened to music. They did the unglamorous work of introducing a Kenyan editor to a Ugandan bookseller and a US-based poet to a Kampala festival director.
Courtesy of eKitabu, I stepped out of that main current with five of the people the night had been built around.
Donica Merhazion had already been on a National Theatre stage that afternoon. Born in Addis Ababa in 1979, in Alem Bekagn — the prison whose name translates as “end of the world” — she is Eritrean-Ethiopian by history, a former journalist, a teacher of humanities at the International School of Kenya, and now a debut novelist. Born at the End of the World, out with Mvua Press in Kenya and Catalyst Press in the United States in February 2026, follows Elen and Girmai through 1970s Ethiopia and Eritrea as the Derg’s Red Terror turns ordinary life into a ledger of disappearances.
She has lived in Eritrea, Zambia, Kenya and the United States. A BA in journalism from the University of Asmara and an MA in education from the University of Maryland sit behind the novel. The book is not a memoir, but it is not a rumour either. It is family history moved into fiction so that a generation that did not sit in that prison can still feel the temperature of the walls.
At Onomo she spoke as a writer who had spent the day explaining trauma to a festival audience and was now, finally, among people who publish that kind of book rather than only applaud it. The conversation kept returning to the same pressure the afternoon BookTalk had named: what a writer owes the dead, and what a publisher owes a story that will not sell like a romance in the first six weeks.
Tramaine Suubi walked into the same night as a Kampala-born poet who has already done the thing Ugandan letters is still negotiating with New York for — two full collections with Amistad, the HarperCollins imprint. phases (2025) is built on the moon. stages (January 2026) is built on the life of a star.
She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, quadrilingual in English, French, Luganda and Runyankore, a former managing editor of Writivism, an assistant editor at The Weganda Review, and a writer who has said, in print, that she works toward “the total liberation of all oppressed people by any means necessary.” She lives between Uganda and the United States and is at work on a novel and a play.
Hearing her in Nakasero after a BookTalk with Merhazion was a reminder that the diaspora is not an airport category. It is a working condition. Suubi’s poems carry Luganda grief-words such as kitalo into journals that will never print the footnotes. A cocktail in Kampala does not resolve that split. It does put the body back in the city that first taught the language.
Betty Kilonzo is the eKitabu night in one person: consulting editor at the house, founder of Blackstartales, author of Closure, the poetry collection Jerusalem, and Househelp Manual on the Mvua list. She was on the stand all weekend and on the Bugolobi podcast the day before. The public version of her life is already a Kenyan set piece — orphaned at five in Kitui, construction work, cabin crew, resignation from the airline to write and edit full time, now a Public Relations and Diplomacy student at Mount Kenya University. In a Books in Africa conversation this year she put her method in one line:
“I want readers to see the mess, the mistakes, the urgency.”
That is the opposite of the polished festival biography. It is also why a reception like this one matters to a writer who learned publishing as a trade, not as a faculty appointment. Kilonzo has self-published and now sits inside a house that can put her book in Nuria, Text Book Centre and on Amazon in the same season. The gap between those two economies is the actual subject of East African publishing. She has lived both sides of it.
Chika Unigwe was the festival’s keynote guest and still made the smaller room. Born in Enugu in 1974, she took a BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an MA from KU Leuven and a PhD from Leiden. On Black Sisters’ Street won the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2012. She is an Africa39 honouree, a former Man Booker International and Caine Prize judge, founder of the Awele Creative Trust, a Knight of the Order of the Crown in Belgium, and now a professor of creative writing at Georgia College.
The recent novels — The Middle Daughter, Grace — keep faith with the older questions: migration, womanhood, the price of leaving and the price of staying. On Saturday afternoon she sat on “The Imagination Gap: Who Gets to Imagine the Future?” At Onomo the register changed. The keynote becomes a person holding a glass, and the person is still thinking about who is allowed to invent tomorrow.
Sheila Akwany is why there was a festival for eKitabu to attach itself to. Director of Goethe-Zentrum Kampala and of the Uganda German Cultural Society, she is the institutional spine of Kampala Writes. After Writivism wound down, Uganda’s writers lost a regular industry room. Akwany has said the quiet part in interviews:
“There was just no space for writers to gather, to launch their work, to talk books, and to engage in peer-to-peer exchange. That’s the gap this festival seeks to fill.”
The 2024 edition opened at Onomo. The 2025 edition filled Yusuf Lule Auditorium at Makerere with Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi as headliner. 2026 moved to the National Theatre and added Unigwe. Akwany’s job on Saturday night was not to perform the festival. It was to keep the room useful — to make sure a Nairobi imprint, a Kampala poet with a New York contract, and a Nigerian professor left Nakasero with more than a photograph.
What did the night actually argue about?
Strip away the hotel lighting and the argument is old and unfinished.
African publishing is still an education industry with a literature hobby. Trade fiction and poetry fight for shelf space against course books. Distribution across EAC borders remains a customs problem dressed up as a cultural one. A title that is visible in Nairobi can be a rumour in Kampala. A Ugandan poet can be reviewed in America and still struggle to put twenty copies in Aristoc. eKitabu’s wager — digital rails, a serious adult imprint, audiobooks, rights sales, a children’s list — is that the hobby can be built into a market if the object is treated like a product and the author is treated like a worker.
The writers in that Onomo room have already paid the personal cost of that wager.
- Merhazion turned a prison birth and a family war into a novel that had to be co-published on two continents before it could stand up.
- Suubi wrote the moon and the star into HarperCollins and still came home to a festival that is only three years old.
- Kilonzo left the aircraft aisle for the desk and now edits other people’s sentences for a living.
- Unigwe has spent two decades proving that an Igbo woman writing from Europe and the American South is still writing Africa.
- Akwany has spent two years building a festival infrastructure in a city that used to improvise literature around bookshops and hotel basements.
None of that is abstract when the people are in the same room, eating, and a reporter is allowed to sit with them because the publisher opened the door.
Writing, on this Saturday, was not described as a lifestyle. It was described as a tool — for memory after state violence, for a domestic worker who needs a manual that treats her as a mind, for a girl in Kitui who was not supposed to become an editor, for a festival city that has spent too long watching Nairobi and Lagos take the continental microphone.
How did the night end?
The invitation closed the house at 22:30. Kampala does not always obey printed times, but this was not a club night. People who had been on stage since morning began to look at the hour. Some would be back at the Theatre on Sunday. Merhazion and Tendo Auko still had stand and panel work. The festival still had a third day.
What remained in the courtyard was the ordinary residue of a good literary evening: numbers exchanged, a book passed across a table for a signature that was not a performance, a publisher and a festival director agreeing to keep talking after the weekend. The larger party kept eating and talking. The interviews ended the way useful interviews end in this city — not with a podium line, but with a handshake on Nakasero and the knowledge that the same people would see each other again under worse lighting, at a stand, with a queue.
eKitabu came to Kampala for LitFest. The cocktail was the proof that a stand is not enough. If African books are going to move, the people who make them have to sit in the same room after the public programme shuts, in a hotel that already hosted this festival’s first edition, and decide whether the next title is a gesture or a business.
On Saturday night at Onomo, for two and a half hours, they chose the room.
