Something important happened in Kigali last week, and it had little to do with the size of the crowd. At the second edition of the Umurage International Books & Art Festival, held under the theme The Future Is Written: Human Voices, Intelligent Tools, African publishers, writers, educators, artists and policymakers asked questions the continent's book sector can no longer postpone. What happens to African languages as artificial intelligence becomes ordinary? Who owns the stories that become digital content? And what should remain unmistakably human when machines can produce text, images and sound? Hosted by Arise Education in technical partnership with Rwanda's Ministry of Youth and Arts, the festival treated AI as more than a technology story. It was a publishing question and an economic one. For African publishers, the issue is not whether they will use AI, it is whether they will have the ownership, infrastructure, data, rights and market access to participate meaningfully in the systems being built around it. The book itself has changed, it can become an audiobook, a classroom resource, a translation, a film or a licensing deal. Each format is a point where value is created, and where it can leak away. Without rights management and distribution, African stories will travel the world while the income they generate lands elsewhere. The voices in Kigali showed why no single approach will do, Nigerian children's author and publisher Amarachukwu Obika-Stevens, whose #ReadIgboChallenge links publishing to indigenous-language reading, asked the practical question: if children are to become readers, where are the books that reflect their languages and realities? Dr. Ebidenyefa Tarila-Nikade, a literacy advocate, spoke from the meeting point of publishing and education. Danish author Ayaz Shah, whose novel La Victoria began in Danish and moved into international rights and theatre, showed that a book's journey need does not end with its first language. Together they complicated the idea of one African story. There are Rwandan stories, Nigerian stories, and the stories of Africans living between languages and continents. The task is to build the systems through which they can survive, circulate and earn value. Women creatives pressed the same point, at the Women Book Creatives Round Table, Emma Claudine Ntirenganya, Director General of Communications at the City of Kigali, argued that women should not only be celebrated as writers but should become publishers, entrepreneurs, decision-makers and owners of intellectual property. Technology, she said, should expand human opportunity rather than make human creativity invisible. Her logic extends naturally: if translation becomes easier, whose languages get translated? If algorithms recommend books, whose books become visible? Perhaps the most consequential conversation sat outside the usual literary format: an executive roundtable on Rwandan authors and the future of learning materials. This is where the book sector meets the education market, and the school system may be African publishing's strongest route to sustainability. A Kinyarwanda story can build reading skills while preserving language and culture; a local illustrator joins the value chain, a publisher can build rights and distribution around content that began as a school reader. Publishing industries do not grow because authors write more books; they grow when editors, illustrators, designers, translators, booksellers, rights professionals and educators surround those authors. Young people need to see a creative economy with many doors: the teenager who draws, the designer drawn to covers, the coder building digital publishing tools. Rwanda has positioned Kigali as a place where technology, enterprise and creativity meet, and sessions at Norrsken House Kigali reflected that. Who publishes, and who owns what is published, is both a creative-economy question and a development question. A festival cannot solve these problems, distribution remains weak, indigenous-language publishing is underfunded, and women and young professionals need capital and pathways. Yet Umurage, only in its second year, has moved from cultural renaissance in 2025 to AI, rights and learning materials. The future of African publishing was not treated as something arriving from elsewhere, it was being negotiated in the room, between writers and publishers, governments and educators, technology and culture. The machines may grow more intelligent, the question remains profoundly human: who gets to tell the story, who gets to own it, and who decides where it goes? The writer is a publisher, author and literary advocate.
