Kenyan blogger James Murua’s website on African literature has a new domain name. Formerly jamesmurua.com, it has been renamed to writingafrica.com.

Nairobi-based Murua is a journalist and podcaster known for his news coverage of the African literary scene. Jamesmurua.com was founded in 2013 and focused on literary news and reviews, and was nominated for “Best Creative Writing Blog” in the 2018 Bloggers Association of Kenya Awards.

The website aims to give visibility to African writers rarely covered by the mainstream African media, with a focus on Black writing as well after the death of George Floyd in 2020.

We spoke to Murua about the reasons for his decision to change the name of the website and here is what he said:

The name change had been something that I had thought about for many years. The actual change was however forced on me as the company that I had outsourced the hosting component of my business had an internal falling out. With the owners abandoning the company, staffers set up a separate company and moved as many of their clients as they could to a new internet host. In that melee, I lost some of my websites including JamesMurua.com which lapsed in the interim to the move. Lucky for me, my company had already saved my content on a separate server and all I needed was register a new domain and start again.

With the new domain, I have changed the brand across the internet from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube as well as the podcast from James Murua to Writing Africa.

Despite the name change, there will be no change in the goals and direction of the blog going forward. Murua added, “The plan is to continue regularly doing stories across the African and Black literary communities like I had done since this project first rolled out in 2013.”

Readers will be happy to know that the website will be similar in terms of content and the future of the website is bright and shining:

One of the things I have noted in the archiving business especially where the internet is concerned is people tend to shift things a bit too much over a short time. This is seen in that since I started my project, there is only Brittle Paper that has stuck around doing the work that needs to be done. Going forward the plan is more of the same; maybe a bit more content as for a few weeks there had been a break in producing. The one thing I see myself doing is trying to find ways to monetise the work I am doing in partnership with others.

Congrats to Murua on the name change! Visit WritingAfrica.com today to check it out.