Building the Routes That Give African Arts Exchange More Than One Centre

For its sixth edition, the Hausa International Book and Arts Festival (HIBAF) is building a circuit between Kaduna, Abuja and London. What began in 2021 as a festival centred on Hausa literature has developed into something larger: an attempt to build an international literary infrastructure from Northern Nigeria, in a language that has too often been treated as peripheral to the global story of African literature.

Sada Malumfashi founded HIBAF around a relatively simple proposition: Hausa literature and intellectual life should not have to pass through English before they can enter conversations about African literature. Five years on, the festival has become a multidisciplinary meeting point for writers, scholars, translators, artists and readers working across Hausa and other African languages.

HIBAF is an itinerant multidisciplinary festival built around Hausa, one of Africa’s major languages. It exists to carve out space for Hausa, a language spoken by over 60 million people across West Africa, with literary traditions dating back to the 13th century. Each edition explores a different theme, not just as a concept, but as a springboard to tailor the programme to interrogate Hausa literature, examine culture, identity, imagination, indigenous knowledge productions amongst others. 

This year’s theme, Afrophony / Hausa Philosophies, asks what happens when African languages are treated not simply as vehicles for cultural expression, but as sites of literary, philosophical and intellectual thought. According to curator Sada Malumfashi, artistic and intellectual production from Africa continues to be filtered through a narrow linguistic lens. African literature, philosophy, and theory circulate globally largely in European languages, reinforcing a colonial inheritance that often equates knowledge with English, French, or Portuguese. This has shaped what is seen, archived, funded, translated, and remembered. Yet across the continent, African languages remain the primary sites where people think, argue, imagine, and make meaning.

This raises a broader question about who gets to build cultural institutions in Nigeria, where they are located, and which languages and communities they are built around. Much of Nigeria’s internationally visible literary infrastructure has historically been concentrated in Lagos, and largely operates in English-language networks. How do we expand beyond a single narrative? HIBAF’s experiment has been to build from Northern Nigeria, around Hausa, while creating international connections that do not require the region or its language to first become something else.

Five years on, that experiment has begun to produce an international network of its own. Much of the festival work in creating cultural infrastructure goes beyond the 3-day festival. The critical layers are in the work before or after the festival. HIBAF 2026 builds on a growing network of international literary and cultural partnerships developed through research exchanges, translation initiatives, and collaborative programming.

A key strand of this engagement emerged through research and institutional exchanges in Switzerland supported by Pro Helvetia, where the curator Sada Malumfashi embarked on a research trip explore decolonial approaches to literary artistic and literary programming’s and how to develop an inclusive and pluralistic view in festival making. During this trip, he established a relationship with Litar Foundation, a public-benefit Swiss non-profit organization based in Zurich that promotes literature, translation, and literary media, whose financial support for HIBAF 2026 reflects a shared commitment to the visibility of underrepresented literary traditions.

Beyond the festival, HIBAF engages in other projects that expand on cultural infrastructures. Recent collaborations include a research and exchange project with SOAS University of London supported through the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) funding framework.The project activities took place in London, Kano, and Abuja, creating new opportunities for dialogue between writers, translators, editors, and publishers across Nigeria and the United Kingdom. It explored how literary translation expands Nigerian literature and increases global visibility for African-language texts. 

HIBAF’s international engagement has also been strengthened through Crossing Tongues, a partnership between Open Arts Development Foundation, Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature, and Push the Boat Out, supported through the British Council Scotland Momentum programme. The initiative will connect Hausa-English poets from Nigeria with poets working in English, Scots, and Scottish Gaelic through residencies, translation workshops, and collaborative publication.

Taken together, these collaborations point towards a larger question: can African-language literary cultures build international relationships without treating European languages as their only point of entry?

The answer is unlikely to be found by stepping entirely outside the systems that already exist. International literary exchange still depends on publishers, translators, universities, funders and cultural institutions, many of which operate through European languages and established cultural networks. The question, then, is not simply how to escape those systems, but how African-language institutions can enter them without surrendering their own linguistic and intellectual centres.

This is where HIBAF’s experiment becomes more consequential. Building an institution around Hausa changes the starting point. Language becomes more than something to be represented, preserved or translated; it becomes a way of producing knowledge, organising relationships and determining where a literary conversation begins.

HIBAF is still a developing institution, and its international network is still being built. But its trajectory raises a question that extends well beyond one festival or one language: what might African cultural life look like if more institutions built internationally from their own linguistic and intellectual centres? Perhaps the future of African literary exchange is not simply about bringing more African-language work into the global conversation, it is more about building enough routes that the conversation no longer has a single centre.