Plug in. Power up. The future is African-made
- Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival
There’s a certain kind of energy that builds before something truly powerful happens. This year’s Fak’ugesi Festival is taking shape.
Since 2014, the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival has been that current - an annual confluence of art, technology, and culture rooted in African futures, creative intelligence, and radical imagination.
Originally sparked by the Wits School of Arts’ Digital Arts Department, Fak’ugesi is firmly embedded today in Wits University’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct.
Over the years, Tshimologong and Fak’ugesi have grown in deep symbiosis. The Precinct serves as a beating heart for digital creativity and entrepreneurship, while the Festival electrifies that pulse, amplifying African voices across gaming, AI, animation, extended reality, sound, design, and more. Together, they form a catalytic ecosystem where creative industries thrive, spark new futures, and set the standard for African-led innovation.
Now entering its 12th year, the Festival continues to evolve, staying fiercely committed to the continent’s creators who are building technologies and systems on their own terms. In October 2025 Fak’ugesi returns not as a moment, but as a movement.
Anchored in key venues like Tshimologong, the Wits Anglo American Digital Dome, Wits Origins Centre, and the surrounding innovation and arts district, the festival activates the ecosystem as a living network. It connects people and ideas through digital storytelling, new media arts, immersive experiences, AI, gaming, performance, design, and the kind of unexpected creative alchemy only Jozi dishes up.
Fak’ugesi isn’t just about what’s next, it’s about what’s needed. As the world grapples with climate emergency, rising inequality, technological disruption, and cultural erasure, the festival invites a rethinking of systems: not just technological, but social, ecological, and spiritual. African creators are not merely responding to the digital age, they’re shaping it.
This year’s program explores the infrastructures, tools, and imaginaries driving innovation: from ancestral intelligence versus AI systems, to sustainability frameworks rooted in community, to the economic justice of owning your digital output.
Over the past decade, Fak’ugesi has grown from a singular vision into a powerful platform empowering young people across the continent to claim space, define their own narratives, and invent new ways of being. This year’s edition builds on that legacy, not with nostalgia, but with momentum.
The call is clear: show up, switch on, and connect with the creators charging the future with meaning and purpose. This is not tech for tech’s sake. This is technology in service of culture, of community, and of something much more electric: creative freedom.