Issue: Bold: Imagining A New Africa

In 2020 we published the Ibua Publishing inaugural short story competition, Packlight: Memoirs of growing up in Africa. What started as a one-off, morphed into a yearly search for stories from the African continent. 

When we declared the theme for the 2021 competition, Bold; Imagining a New Africa, we hoped to distract ourselves from the effects of the raging pandemic at our doorsteps. We hoped that out of the stories we read we would find a pattern for how our new futures would pan out; like charting the milky way of our dreams.

After much hand wringing and sifting and debating, we realized that the stories that made it to the long list were as much about our future as they were about our present and past. We work hard at Ibua Publishing to create and exhibit work that captures the essence of what it means to be African, raised African and live in Africa. The Bold collection has 8 short stories, 8 poems from the long listed stories as well as essays and poetry from the Ibua Publishing writers’ room.

To truly enjoy Bold, we must put aside our expectations of what the future should be like. We must open ourselves to the understanding that there exist as many future variations as people living on this continent. While some writers chose to dream of an Africa fully engaged in the technological advances of the world, most writers dreamed of futures where people transformed, or not.

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