This October, the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival returns to electrify the streets of Braamfontein with a surge of unstoppable creative energy. From 7 – 12 October 2025, Fak’ugesi 2025 #PowerSurge will ignite the heart of the city with a defiant call to Africa’s digital creators: take control of the grid, spark new systems, and route power on your own terms.

Now in its twelfth edition, Fak’ugesi has become a catalyst for the continent’s digital renaissance – a meeting ground where the next wave of African innovators, artists, and technologists gather to experiment, collaborate, and rewire what’s possible. From its home base at the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, the festival will convert Braamfontein into a living power circuit of
ideas and action, where ancestral intelligence fuses with artificial intelligence, climate justice drives sustainable futures, and immersive tech lights the way for bold new creative economies.

Festival Highlights

• The Surge Experience: A three-stop immersive tour with our signature fulldome
  programme at the Wits Anglo American Digital Dome, ancestral intelligence and the
  Original Creative Explosion at the Origins Centre, and Future Forward XR and VR
  immersions at Tshimologong Precinct.
• Afrique Creative 3: An Agence Française de Developpement (AFD) funded
  acceleration program supporting 15 creative entrepreneurs from 10 countries,
  culminating in a bootcamp and showcase at Fak’ugesiPRO 2025.
• Immersive Africa – Bridging Continents Through Digital Creativity: Powered by
  EUNIC’s Spaces of Culture programme, Immersive Africa lights up the dome with
  boundary-breaking fulldome works from visionary African, European, and South
  American creators. The journey ignites with the AfriVerse: Step Inside Our Stories
  experience, offering three electrifying immersive worlds to explore:

Art Edition – Where colour, sound, and movement collide in a sensory explosion
Environmental Edition – A visceral plunge into Earth’s urgent rhythms and wild beauty
Cosmosceno Edition – A cosmic odyssey across galaxies of imagination

Step inside, and let the dome dissolve the edges of reality.

• Afropean Intelligence Challenge: A five-day AI bootcamp exploring Afrocentric
  approaches to AI, ending with the Entropy symposium.
• Three Fields: A South Africa, India and UK XR collaboration on food sustainability and
  indigenous practices.
• Fak’ugesi Awards: Celebrating Africa’s digital rebels, disruptors and dreamers in
  animation, gaming, XR, and design.
• Showcases and Conference: World-class exhibitions, gaming and XR showcases, and
  a conference featuring leading African and international speakers.

Why Now?
Africa is not catching up, Africa is charging ahead. With the world’s youngest workforce by 2035
and some of the fastest-growing economies globally, the continent is shaping the systems of the
future. Fak’ugesi 2025 is where that future is made visible.

Festival Dates: 7- 12 October 2025
Location: Braamfontein, Johannesburg | Tshimologong Precinct and partner venues

fakugesi.co.za