Ibua keen to start writing revolution 

American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer is famously quoted to have said that if a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

In Uganda, the novelists do not appear to be in luck. Not with constantly facing the challenge of publishing their body of work. Charity Karungi Kwatampora is confident her native country is on the cusp of finding a solution to the aforesaid challenge. 

The solution, in Karungi’s assessment, started to gain traction after poets, who performed under the Lantern Meet of Poets community at Uganda National Cultural Centre (UNNC) in Kampala, ran into a brick wall. After one failed attempt at publishing their works, the poets succeeded with their second bite at the cherry in 2018. 

They pulled the feat off by building synergies with Ibua Publishing. Ibua is a Ugandan-owned digital brand. Its mission is to promote storytelling in Africa as a tool to harness the continent’s future. Ibua is a Swahili word describing a state of something. The aforesaid state is akin to a catalytic idea that gives birth to another thing. 

Ibua Lab
According to Karungi, the poets were a good anchor and a training space accessible for creatives on the African continent to get skills and improve their craft needed to be created.
“Next thing we had the journal, the online magazine. We have published three books and three more are on the way this year. The focus is to support writers living on the continent. The idea is about creating opportunities at home without going to look for better publishing ecosystems outside the continent,” Karungi explains.

The books can be accessed online at the ibuajournal.com/shop or at Aristoc Booklet. Karungi says “It was very hard for people to search for publishing houses, so Ibua helps emerging established writers to access training and make their work competitive on the global market” she adds, adding, “In the beginning, writing is fun, but in the middle you get stuck. We learn how to navigate all that.”

Printing ecosystem 
Karungi says Ibua is keen on creating a community of partners such that conversations can be held in terms of places of printing and cost of printing. The end goal, she adds, is to create a sustainable printing ecosystem.

“We have established a digital publishing side. We have a quarterly published magazine, which is easier for people to access. These days we have a continental call,” she notes, adding, “One of the challenges is that people have no access to editors and development support. 

The reality is that your first work is not the best and most people will not publish your first work. But as a writer, if I do not have access to a professional editor, how then do I get my work to be competitive? So we are committed to get that. With all our submissions, we get them editorial support.” Karungi says they have online editorial training and two are lined up for adults this year.

“We are also introducing teenagers to the training because we want to encourage young people to write. Then we have authors who have manuscripts that they want to publish. That is limited because we can only manage to print a few for reasons of affordability and storage,” she adds. 

Karungi is cognizant of how the modern-day consumer accesses their content online. And that is why they enable them to access content on YouTube. “People in Kampala are on TikTok, but when you move to villages where there is no Internet, how do people access their information? She wonders. 
The physical book is still relevant, she reasons. “Despite digital publishing, we are still struggling with the basics of traditional printing—all those are still elements affecting our publishing industry.”
 
The Lantern Meet of Poets congregates fortnightly to share ideas and poetry. While mitigating the challenges, Karungi says Ugandans and Africans need to tell their stories. She adds that they should be intentional about documenting interesting things on their continent as well as exploring the fictitious creativity of the writers. “Fictions holds truths for us. The stories that reconnect hold a certain degree of truth. They do not just entertain; they educate,” she adds.