Poetry Africa is an annual international poetry festival curated and presented by the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban each year during October. The festival features Spoken Word & Publish Poets in performances and dynamic engagements which includes panel discussions, campus and school visits, poetry exchanges, book launches, open mic sessions and the ever popular slam jam competition.
Poetry Africa has, under the lead of Karen Ijumba, created a digital map of all the poets and performances that they have hosted since 1997. Karen Ijumba is working with us to link Poetry Africa’s metadata to our database. This metadata includes around 600 individual poets, information about their works, lives, and performances and even links to extant published works and works online. We are also using Poetry Africa’s database to model festival data.
ALMEDA in collaboration with the Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University invites you to an online workshop on Thursday 4 September at 13:15 – 16:00 (Central European Summer Time). In this workshop scholars will discuss the implications approaching street preaching as performance and oral literary genre. Viewing publicly delivered sermons…
ALMEDA postdoctoral fellow, Gloria Ajami Makokha, presented a paper, “Digitizing Jina: Providing Visibility to The Khanga’s Oral Literary Messages”, at the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) conference, held at the University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria, 9–12 July 2025. Makokha’s research project focuses on the ways in which the Khanga…
We have published two new datasets on our Zenodo platform that will interest anyone working on print and online literary magazines. The classic anti-apartheid South African magazine Staffrider includes around 1770 individual texts and was published between 1978 to 1993, while the Ugandan-based Lawino content is much more recent (2014-2015).…
In our new ALMEDA pamphlet, postdoctoral fellow Oulia Makkonen interviews Coffi Abdoul Karim, a producer of the Ivorian cultural programs Théâtre de chez nous and Ce soir au village. The interview is part of a larger exploration in Makkonen’s work of the theatrical scene and its relationship to television history in Côte d’Ivoire from the…