Kampala Writes LitFest wrapped its third edition on August 30, closing out three days at Uganda’s National Theatre built around the theme “Where Stories Begin: The Imaginary and the Art of Possibility,” with Nigerian-born novelist Chika Unigwe headlining as this year’s keynote guest. True to that theme, much of the festival’s programming circled back to a single, recurring question: where does imagination come from, who gets to shape it, and what happens to it once machines, markets, and donors get involved.

That question ran hardest through the festival’s artificial intelligence programming. In a panel titled “Can Machines Imagine?,” Felix Kitaka, Bernard Nakireza, and Betty Kilonzo, moderated by Edna Ninsiima, pushed back against treating AI as a fixed, external force. “AI is what it is because of what we are giving it. And we keep giving it then complaining about it,” Kilonzo said. Kitaka urged the room to separate present-day AI from where the technology is headed, noting there are “two different ways to think of AI: you can think of AI now an AI 10 years from now.” Nakireza turned that instability into a case against premature regulation: “If we were to come up with a law for AI right now, by tomorrow it would be obsolete with the rate at which AI technology moves.” The subject resurfaced later in “The Imagination Gap,” a panel bringing together Ninsiima, Ama Dadson, Chika Unigwe, and Mirrianne Mahn under Wanjiru Koinange’s moderation, where Unigwe offered the festival one of its most quoted lines: “Your imagination is as high as what you know.” Dadson pushed back on any assumption that new tools level the playing field on their own, “Technology isn’t automatic access and discovery”, while Ninsiima redirected the panel toward land and climate, arguing “we are not thinking about land as a preservation of heritage but about something that we sell for money,” and Mahn tied the thread back to justice more broadly: “There’s no social justice without climate justice.” Elsewhere, author Michelle Ivy Alwedo, discussing “The Imagination in Poetry” alongside Jane Okot P’Bitek Langoya and moderator Irene Mutuzo, drew a hard line on authorship in the AI era: “If you write using AI, you have to accept the work is not yours. It’s for the company.” Okot P’Bitek Langoya, for her part, located her own imaginative practice elsewhere entirely: “I interpret usual things in an unusual manner.”

Questions of ownership carried into the festival’s roundtable on “Decoloniality and the Stories That Make Us,” where Wanjiru Koinange and Yusuf Serunkuma, moderated by Bernard Tabaire, argued that African literary infrastructure remains hostage to outside money and outside systems. “We would not need donor funding if government were doing its job,” Koinange said, and Serunkuma extended the point to the economy at large: “This economy is not ours. We need to have our economy in our hands.” The festival’s closing panel, “Who Defines African Stories?,” featuring Philisiwe Twijnstra, Bazil Onen, and Lena Mirembe Pira under Goretti Kyomuhendo’s moderation, pressed the same question toward publishing gatekeeping and the oral tradition. Twijnstra recounted an eight-year road to publication: “I took eight years to write my book and all publishers found it risky. It took one bold publisher who could think outside the box to say let’s do it.” Mirembe Pira offered a different kind of proof of audience, pointing to organic traffic on Africanbooks.com: “I track analytics and we have between 2,000 to 7,000 site visits at Africanbooks.com, and yet we don’t advertise — this is all from interest.” Onen closed the panel by locating African storytelling’s real authority outside the publishing system altogether: “The real African story did not start with ISBN. The real African story survived because no one owns it. It has no copyright.”

Conservation and creative livelihoods got their own dedicated sessions. In “Reimagining the Planet,” moderated by Akampurira Lillian Aujo, veterinarian and conservationist Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka described the uphill task of funding work that sits between animal and human health: “There’s more money for humans than animals and more money for development than conservation… we had to educate the donors.” Deborah Tendo, asked how she avoids being the first and only woman in her field, pointed to mentorship as her answer: she runs both a logistics mentoring track for women and a free book club for aspiring writers. A separate dialogue on “Monetizing Streaming Content,” moderated by Roland Byagaba, traced three different paths from posting online to earning from it. Faisal Pyepar recalled burning out tweeting a hundred times a day for nothing before pivoting to “the serious side of content marketing,” built on authenticity, value, and consistency. Patricia Kahill traced her own arc back to age twelve, through Black Planet and MySpace, into early Twitter, where she and a small circle of early adopters began monetizing by publicizing other people’s work. Fiona Kemigisha described starting on WordPress writing about natural hair, landing her first paid gig from a hair-extension client, and eventually launching the podcast “The Unpopular Opinion” before pivoting fully into public speaking.

Beyond the panels, the festival made room for readers and younger writers alike. “The Books That Stayed With Me,” a book talk between Florence Baingana and Maureen Andinda moderated by David Kangye, turned reflective: Baingana noted that “each stage of life” tends to have its own defining book, while Andinda described reading itself as an act of communion — “communion with an idea, communion with the character, communion with the author.” A book talk pairing Tramaine Suubi’s Stages with Donica Merhazion’s Born at the End of the World, moderated by Phillip Matogo, closed out Day Two’s panel programming; Merhazion described writing five solo drafts in isolation before a writing group’s honest feedback finally moved the manuscript forward, and Suubi argued for precision as a writerly duty, since “the words we use matter… words are so crucial to how we feel.” Day Two itself closed on a different register entirely, with a live performance from DOA DOA LIVE sending the crowd into the night.

Younger voices had a session of their own in “Children, Stories and Imagination,” moderated by Penelope Nankunda, featuring children’s authors Murungi Esther Mugisa, Alinaitwe Orianah, and Damalie Kisakye. Mugisa turned her frustration with COVID lockdowns into a letter to the president that later became a book; Kisakye channeled her anger at corruption into a poem, encouraged by a friend’s insistence that the truth deserves to be heard; and Orianah, noticing that mental health conversations rarely include children, wrote directly for kids navigating struggles adults tend to overlook. A separate creative writing workshop, led by Mirrianne Mahn, gave participants hands-on tools for finding their own voice on the page. Between sessions, the festival’s book stand did its own work of persuasion, stocked with titles including The HouseHelp Manual, When Love Says Goodbye by Schola Moraa, Warrior Boy by Virginia Clay, and multiple titles from David Maillu.

The festival closed with electric poetry performances from Mitch Isabirye, Betty Kilonzo, and Tramaine Suubi, followed by closing remarks from Goethe-Zentrum Kampala director Sheila Akwany and the full organizing team.

See pictures from the event below, courtesy of @josh_dago__.