Quramo Festival Comes With Healing Balm For Civil War Wounds

The ninth edition of Quramo Festival of Words (QFest) 2025 will launch an advocacy project titled: ‘961 Days, Brothers at War – Never Again: The Nigerian Civil War’.

The project, which takes place during the festival days of October 2 to 5, aims to engender conversations within and outside of the event and will serve as a means of starting the process of national healing and true nationhood.

Featuring in the project panel are heavyweight writers and political commentators such as war historians: Dr Akintunde Akinwumni and Max Siollun; The Nation Newspaper, Editorial Board chairman, Mr Sam Omatseye, Professor Dul Johnson of the University of Jos; poet and playwright, Mallam Denja Abdullahi, Booker Prize nominee, Chigozie Obioma; lawyer, poet and winner of the NLNG Prize for Literature, Tade Ipadeola, among others.

The festival will also feature an exhibition of recent, old fictional and non-fictional books on the Nigerian Civil War.

Also, Mukoma wa Thiong’o, Kenyan-American author and son of the deceased African literary giant, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, will headline the festival alongside veteran actress Joke Silva. The professor of English Literature, Cornell University, will host a writing masterclass and feature in the festival’s ‘Up Close and Personal’ session, where he’ll be engaged in a no-holds-barred moderated conversation with the festival attendees.

On the other hand, Actress Joke Silva will feature in Q-Conversation, which delves into a major creative’s personal and professional life in ways their fans have never seen before.

Excited about the festival’s growth since its inception in 2017, the convener and Quramo Publishing chief executive, Gbemi Shasore, said the festival programme and guest participants have always been curated to contribute to and enliven the Nigerian cultural landscape.

“This year is remarkable as our festival is bringing a big fish, Prof Mukoma wa Ngugi, to Nigeria, to join other notable cultural workers on the home turf to shed light on some weighty subjects.

“This year’s advocacy panel of national and even global dimensions is carefully curated to start a national healing discourse and process. That is why we will adopt it as an advocacy project and we will take it to the highest level of our political space beyond the incisive conversations at the festival. It is our modest hope that Nigeria will bloom after our efforts,” Shasore said.

Among other activities of the festival are the Quramo Writers Prize 2025, which will publish and award the best submitted literary manuscript N1 million cash prize, in addition to panel sessions focused on AI and storytelling, Building Climate Resilient Communities via storytelling, and the launch of ‘Moonbeam: An Anthology of Short Stories’, featuring works by Nigeria’s renowned culture journalists.