Fak’ugesi 2025 turns South Africa’s digital paradox into a creative power surge, spotlighting African innovators who are rewriting the global tech narrative
My average screen time is a secret I’ll take to the grave, preferably while doomscrolling my own eulogy on the way down. But, judging by the national stats, I won’t be the only one.
According to LiveNOW, as of 2025, South Africans are clocking an eye-watering 9 hours and 37 minutes online every single day, outpacing the global average of 6 hours and 38 minutes like a nation collectively possessed by its wi-fi signal. Which is ironic, considering that half the time the lights are out. A country where people can lose power but never a connection.
But peek beneath the glossy glow of “smart” screens and the numbers start to look less like progress and more like a national fever dream. According to Reuters, the country’s online retail market is set to blast past $7.42 billion in 2025 and News24 reports online gambling soaring to R1.14 trillion, a 40% leap from last year.
Still, as the Mail & Guardian warns, with over 90 unlicensed sites and only sports betting above board, it looks like this system runs on a suspicious cocktail of loopholes and lethargy — the digital paradox.
Amid South Africa’s persistent economic and social inequalities, digital progress often obscures old power dynamics. New tools, old masters. Case in point: Elon Musk’s Starlink plans, foiled by B-BBEE rules mandating 30% black ownership.
Musk cried “racism,” claiming the rules blocked his satellite dreams because of his skin, while regulators countered that it was compliance, not race, grounding his ambitions. The episode reads like a cosmic parable of tech, entitlement and the illusion of meritocracy. It’s clear that tech and the way we use it is intrinsically tied to power.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that we have a far larger stake in this story, far beyond being mere consumers. And I figured redirecting our attention towards local innovation was key. Few initiatives capture this impulse like the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival. Its 2025 theme “Power Surge” crackles with dual meaning — a nod to South Africa’s literal energy crisis and a metaphor for the unstoppable surge of informal creativity, digital innovation and African futurism, which can ostensibly influence existing power structures.
Since 2014, Fak’ugesi has been a beacon for African innovators and tech lovers, insisting that African futures are made here, not imported. The festival links Johannesburg to creative hubs across the continent and beyond, encouraging collaboration among artists, coders, designers and theorists while amplifying marginalised voices in global tech imaginaries. From VR installations to AI-driven performances, workshops and experimental storytelling, Fak’ugesi has cultivated a lineage of radical experimentation where art and technology thrive in symbiosis.
A highlight at this year’s Fak’ugesi Festival is Glitching the Future, a collaboration between the Amsterdam based ZAM Magazine and Johannesburg based Bubblegum Club. The experiment has already brought together creators like Aluta Null, whose visual direction gave it a local techy edge. Thulile Gamedze, Maneo Mohale, Amogelang Maledu and Khanya Mashabela weaved affect, pleasure and resistance into nuanced readings of the digital landscape.
At Fak’ugesi Glitching the Future presents a transcontinental symposium, livestreamed from Johannesburg to the Open Art Exchange in Schiedam (NL) — an embodiment of the festival’s enduring commitment to cross-border dialogue. The panel features new media artist Natalie Paneng, writer and creative director Lindiwe Mngxitama, a sonic lecture tracing the evolution from Kwaito to Amapiano by P_ssy Party and Professor Margriet van der Waal, joining virtually from Schiedam to situate the project within global discourses on digital culture studies.
Paneng’s work is known for fusing performance and digital technology to build immersive worlds centred on distinctly local perspectives. A Wits Dramatic Arts graduate and Leon Gluckman Prize recipient, Paneng transforms space into narrative-rich, multi-sensory experiences, as seen in Hey MTV, Welcome To My Crib (2019) and Ophelia Does Backstroke (2022). Through her “techno-imaginative” practice, Paneng challenges Eurocentric futurisms, expanding how we see, feel and co-create possible worlds and the technological processes therein.
Lindiwe Mngxitama, self described as “an academic-in-crisis” and storyteller, works across dreamscapes and oral histories. Her interventions demonstrate that imagination is an ethical and temporal act, one that threads past, present and future into a continuous dialogue. The collective P_ssy Party brings a queer, feminist and performative sensibility to the day. Founded in Johannesburg in 2016, they are known within the local LGBTQIA+ community for creating inclusive nightlife experiences and collective sonic praxis.
This experimental session will be loosely “facilitated” by yours truly. After all, I played a part in the inception of Glitching the Future, driven in part by the love and longing of my own intellectual loins. Nothing in this project exists at any level of certainty, but from a place of liminality, with intention to not only illuminate the stakes of the story of digital technology but also showcase how young African creators are radicalising how the continent engages with tech, building a bridge between the imaginative and the practical, the aesthetic and the infrastructural.
The Festival’s new director Alby Michaels frames Power Surge as a rallying cry for African creators to design systems powered “from within.” The programme includes: The Surge Experience, a three-stop immersive circuit across the Wits Digital Dome, the Origins Centre and Tshimologong, blending ancestral intelligence, AI and XR environments; Afrique Creative 3, a pan-African acceleration programme for 15 creative entrepreneurs; Immersive Africa, a cross-continental showcase of dome-based digital art and VR worlds supported by EUNIC’s Spaces of Culture; the Afropean Intelligence Challenge, exploring Afrocentric approaches to AI; Three Fields, a South Africa-India-UK XR collaboration on food sustainability and the Fak’ugesi Awards, which honours innovators in gaming, animation, XR and design.
By the time you read this, the festival will already be well underway, buzzing through Braamfontein’s hot veins, so dala what you must to not miss out. Visitors usually range from professional innovators, young gamers and developers to families and kids who are there to play. This multiplicity is usually recorded and shared, which speaks volumes to the mission.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking of this festival as just an event; it’s a manifesto in motion. Its endurance sprouting from a rejection of the tired myth that Africa is still “catching up”.
Africa is the future. This is a prelude. The current is live. Don’t sleep on the surge.
Fak’ugesi Festival runs from 9 to 12 October 2025 and the free Glitching the Future symposium takes place on 11 October 2025 at 2.30 at Tshimologong Precinct, 41 Juta Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg.