Fak’ugesi 2025: Power Surge, Africa’s Digital Creativity is Set to Generate Its Own Current

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.

“Power Surge is more than a theme, it’s a rallying call. We are here to claim our creative energy, to design our own systems, and to show the world what African digital brilliance looks like when it’s powered from within,” says Alby Michaels, Festival Director.

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.

“From our home at the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct in the heart of Braamfontein, the 2025 Festival will light up with the force of a continent in motion – artists, technologists, storytellers, and cultural visionaries sparking new connections between ancestral intelligence and artificial intelligence, climate action and creative sustainability, immersive tech and economic justice.” says Mark Harris, Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct CEO.

Festival Dates: 7- 12 October 2025
Location: Braamfontein, Johannesburg | Tshimologong Precinct and partner venues                   Tickets available on Quicket.