‘Mombera Rising’ – meet speculative eco-fiction author Muthi Nhlema at Chambo Market, 26 September at 6pm

You’re in for a literary treat. Next week at Chambo Market Bookshop and Gallery, Muthi Nhlema, one of the authors of speculative anthology Mombera Rising: Ngoni Chronicles of Nature Futures from Malawi, will be in conversation Logos Open Culture’s director Muti Etter-Phoya.

Imagine the year is 2054, and you are in Mzimba. The Esangweni, the gathering of the eight elders, calls for a return to cultural values. Ngonis from the diaspora return home to Mzimba. You are part of the Ngoni’s renaissance. Mombera Rising, written by Muthi Nhlema and Ekari Mbvundula Chirombo and published earlier this year, includes three captivating stories envisioning a Ngoni future over the next century.

Set in a futuristic Malawi, Mombera Rising invites readers to imagine a preferable future for the Ngoni tribe of Northern Malawi where they can cast aside colonial notions of progress and modernity in managing their natural environments on their own terms, drawing on their deep knowledge and beliefs.

The book was born from from a research project called African Futures, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which applied the Nature Futures Framework to diverse African contexts. This Framework is used to envision scenarios and models of desirable futures for people and nature. You can find out more here:

Straddling the intersection of nature, culture and technology, this anthology is the culmination of over a year’s worth of collaboration, conversation and even some contestation between scientists, writers, artists and the Ngoni community.

What has been created hopefully gives creative voices from the Global South a platform to illuminate alternative paths towards sustainable futures and engage with issues of sustainability from a local, African context.

Join us at Chambo Market Bookshop and Gallery in Old Town Mall, Lilongwe on Thursday 26 September at 6pm. Wine will be served – as usual!

Mombera Rising: Ngoni Chronicles of Nature Futures from Malawi  (2024) is available for download.

About the Authors

Muthi Nhlema

Muthi Nhlema is a short story writer who accidentally stumbled into the world of African Speculative Fiction and hasn’t figured out where the exit door is yet.

Spotlighted as one of the 100 African Writers of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy by Geoff Ryman, Muthi’s first foray into speculative fiction was his novella, ‘Ta O’Reva’, about the return of Nelson Mandela to a post-apocalyptic South Africa. The novella won third prize at the 2015 International Freeditorial Long-Short Story Competition and was also shortlisted for Best Novella at the inaugural 2017 Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, alongside internationally acclaimed writers such as Nnedi Okorafor. An excerpt of the novella, ‘Legacy’ was long-listed for the 2015 Writivism Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the 2015 Dede Kamkondo Short Story Award.

Muthi’s second speculative fiction piece, ‘One Wit’ This Place’, about a broken family trying to survive a world ravaged by climate change, opened the 2016 Imagine Africa 500 anthology, and was later re-published by the Manchester Review in 2017. The story received positive reviews, including a mention by the Nigerian writer and editor Wole Talabi, who called it one of the top 10 African Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction pieces of 2016. Muthi’s other non-speculative fiction piece, ‘Free Seating’, a first-person account of an unpleasant bus-ride with a twist, won the 2015 First Merchant Bank-Malawi Writers’ Union Short Story Prize.

In late 2021, Muthi was selected to participate in the prestigious International Writers Programme at the University of Iowa in the United States, making him the fifth Malawian writer to participate in the residency since its founding in 1967. Since the residency, Muthi has been nursing a stubborn interest in using speculative fiction to reimagine alternate histories and indigenous futures liberated from colonial or western paradigms of progress and modernity (something easier said than done!). This anthology, in its own way, gave Muthi a chance to get off his backside, stop living in his head and take a stab at penning such histories and futures on the taunting wastelands of the blank page.

Ekari Mbvundula Chirombo

Ekari Mbvundula Chirombo is a speculative fiction writer of over 15 short stories, and has won numerous prizes and recognition for her stories, including 2nd Prize in an African-wide, Nigerian-based short story marathon called The Writer 2016.

Her ebook Montague’s Last (published as Ekari Mbvundula) is a short story about a 17th Century African slave in a French dungeon who spends the final moments of his life on an invention which will change the world. Montague’s Last has been adapted into an audio podcast on Strange Horizons, republished in Omenana speculative fiction magazine, and was selected as a subject of study by a masters student at the University of Stellenbosch.

Her story Undying Love, also published in Omenana, is about a young man in Joburg who becomes possessed by an evil spirit, and pushes the love of his life away to protect her, only for her to return to try and free him. Undying Love was added to the long list nominations for the 2020 Nommo Awards, and was also added to the Nebula Recommended Reading List.

She is the founder of the Story Ink Africa: Storytelling Sessions, where up-and-coming writers from around Malawi would read their stories to a live audience. She now edits books under her company Story Ink Africa: Writing Services.