LitFest Harare 2025 celebrates the languages and legacies of art

LitFest Harare 2025 returns with a Kalanga-inspired theme, hosting over 80 artists across eight countries and celebrating multilingual storytelling, cultural memory and the evolving legacies of African art (image source)

LitFest Harare returns for its 12th edition later this month with a Kalanga-inspired theme, “Lebeleka Takawilila” — “Speak, we are listening” — an invitation to hear ancestral voices, honour present rhythms and carry stories into the future. Festival director Chirikure Chirikure frames this year’s message as a commitment to artistic continuity and cultural resonance, positioning literature and allied arts as living archives that build bridges, preserve memory and shape identity in a changing world. Running from November 26 to 29, LitFest Harare 2025 will unfold across two city venues — Alliance Française de Harare and Theatre in the Park — spaces long associated with the festival’s ethos of open dialogue, performance and community engagement. Organisers highlight a programme designed to draw readers, writers, scholars and audiences into conversations across generations and languages, while sustaining LitFest’s hallmark blend of readings, panels, workshops and interdisciplinary showcases.

This year’s festival is set to host over 80 participants spanning at least eight countries, including Botswana, Lesotho, Sweden, Malawi, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The curatorial intent is to deepen cross-border literary exchange and ensure a multiplicity of voices on craft, translation, cultural memory and the social responsibilities of art. That international reach builds on LitFest’s track record since its establishment in 2014 as a platform for writers and artists to present work and for the public to engage through readings, performances, debates and outreach, typically over four days in central Harare and sometimes online.

Chirikure underscores the thematic arc “The Languages and Legacies of Art” as a deliberate focus on how literature, poetry, theatre, visual storytelling and music communicate across time. It is a call to listen — not only to the art itself but to the communities that produce and sustain it, and to the ethical frames that guide cultural exchange. The festival’s multilingual character, with English among other languages, forms part of that listening practice, widening participation and expanding the range of expressive traditions represented on stage and in conversation. Programme highlights include an opening evening reception; a theatrical adaptation of the classic novel and O’ Level set text “Tambaoga Mwanangu”; an evening of poetic intersection; a silent reading hour paired with a book swap; a visual poetry exhibition; a poetry slam; and a closing concert in partnership with SoFar Sounds Harare celebrating African unity at a surprise location. These curations balance pedagogical and popular energies — school-set literature alongside contemporary performance; quiet communal reading alongside the dynamism of slam poetry; and cross-genre collaborations that foreground voice, rhythm and community as the beating heart of literary culture.

LitFest’s design this year also emphasises accessibility and the practical infrastructures of participation: how audiences enter the festival’s spaces feeling part of the conversation, how early-career writers find mentors and readers, and how communities see themselves reflected in programming. The curatorial choices suggest a festival aware of the demands on art to be both sanctuary and platform — a place where language is cared for and challenged, where legacies are celebrated and interrogated, and where new forms emerge through dialogue rather than isolation. For a city that often convenes art under pressure — economic, social and technological — LitFest Harare’s thematic insistence on listening is striking. It centres care: for memory, for craft, for the meanings art produces in daily life. It asks audiences to engage beyond reaction, to inhabit questions about lineage, responsibility and imagination. And by staging these questions across venues rooted in local cultural life, the festival affirms that literature’s power is not abstract — it is embodied, communal and consequential.

As the festival opens, the measure of its success will be felt not only in attendance or headlines but in the conversations that persist: students carrying scenes from “Tambaoga Mwanangu” into classroom debates; poets remapping their practice through multilingual exchange; readers finding themselves in the silent hour; and musicians threading unity through a closing set that travels beyond the stage. In that sense, “Lebeleka Takawilila” is both theme and practice — an invitation to speak and to hear, to honour what art has carried and to shape what it must still become.