The listening Platformutlwa.
to listen, and to feel.
AudiobookMastersListen to your imagination“Utlwa” — in Setswana — means to listen, and to feel.
We chose the name because listening, in the tradition we come from, is not passive. To utlwa is to take something in through the ear and let it settle in the body. The platform is built on that idea: audio you don't just hear, but feel.
A platform built for African-language audio.
Utlwa is the listening platform that carries the AudiobookMasters catalogue. It is where our productions meet their listeners — on the web, in a mobile app, and offline for the data realities of the continent.
You stream a story on the way to work, download it for the taxi rank, and pick it back up at home. The catalogue is African-language first: the languages people actually speak, voiced by the people who speak them.
Get Utlwa
One catalogue, wherever you listen. Web is live today — mobile and desktop are on the way.
The catalogue
Stories rooted in oral tradition — folk tales, proverbs, poetry, oral history, and contemporary fiction — performed in the languages they belong to. A few of the languages we carry:
- Setswana
- Sesotho
- isiZulu
- isiXhosa
- Xitsonga
- Sepedi
- Tshivenda
- siSwati
- Afrikaans
- English
Featured titles
A sample from the catalogue — representative of the kinds of stories and languages Utlwa carries.
Utlwa & AudiobookMasters
Utlwa is the platform. AudiobookMasters is the studio behind it. Every title on Utlwa is produced by ABM — recorded, directed, edited, and mastered to the same standard, whether it is a Setswana folk tale or a corporate wellness session.
Utlwa's own site keeps its story short and points listeners here for the detail. So this is the detail: Utlwa exists because African-language stories deserve a home built for them, and ABM exists to make those stories worth listening to.