a literary magazine by African Leadership University
When we are tempted to look within any beginning, what do we find? What emotions follow tales we hear and the places we find ourselves? Our inaugural issue, students in ALU explore the feeling of finding themselves at various starts and places.
read the full issue →naissance, cribbed from the French word meaning birth or origin, is the fufillment of African Leadership University's dedication to storytelling. That is: fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, plays, film, and anything else that is strange, bizarre, and overflowing from within creative African minds. The future of African creativity is in the power of language. With it, we can illuminate the spaces between what has always been and what will always be.
Founded in 2025, we are most interested in brilliant language, bent this way and that in the name of form. We are on the lookout for stories that feel like dreams, hallucinations, or memories..
We aim to publish quarterly. Each issue will be organised around a loose theme. We are not a paying market yet, but
We are currently only accept submissions from ALU Students, Staff, and Alumni. However, we plan to open to the wider literary world once we've gotten a rhythm going :) We read year-round and respond within three months. We accept previously unpublished work only. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but please withdraw promptly if your work is accepted elsewhere.
fiction: up to 15,000 words. we love strong sentences, strange plots, and prose that lifts off the page.
poetry: up to three poems per submission. we want poetry that feels rife with feeling.
creative nonfiction: up to 5,000 words: essays, memoir, hybrid forms. we want essays that shatter the personal and use the shards as glinting lenses.
Submit by sending us an email! Attach your submission, with a cover letter in the body. Please follow the Shunn Manuscript Format.
For general inquiries, please reach out to:
thewritingcentre@alueducation.com
For submission-related questions or submissions, please mail:
For more work by naissance, please visit our substack: