Inside the Future of African Speculative Art at Aké 2025
By Jerry Adesewo
Long before the bright lights of the Aké Arts and Book Festival illuminated the faces of this year’s Nommo Award winners, I had made an internal commitment to be present. The email inviting me to serve as Special Guest and Facilitator for the African Speculative Fiction Society (ASFS) workshop arrived through a Kenyan colleague on the ACYTA Board, John Nnamai. It felt less like invitation and more like inevitability.
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Arriving at Aké 2025 for the first time in its thirteen-year history was to step into a charged atmosphere. Creativity did not sit quietly—it moved, hummed, collided. Languages, imaginations, geographies, and ideas fused into a single pulse: Africa dreaming itself forward.
A few days later, at Café One inside the University of Lagos, the workshop venue embodied the moment perfectly. A creative commons nested inside an academic ecosystem—half study, half provocation. Facilitating the ASFS workshop was not mere contribution; it was immersion. The faces before me—young, restless, brilliant—revealed a hunger long denied by traditional arts structures. Our conversations moved beyond genre into ideological terrain: world-building, indigenous futurisms, cosmological memory, speculative rebellion, and the shared insistence that Africa must narrate its future rather than watch it be assigned.
When Disciplines Converse
In my opening reflection, as the room settled into thought, I offered a single premise:
“Art does not merely respond to the world; art reimagines it.”
From there, the session unfolded into a dialogue on why speculative performing arts cannot remain siloed. We now inhabit a world where climate science shapes narrative urgency, AI co-authors poems, neuroscience refines choreography, and architectural futures inform stage scenography. If contemporary life is hybrid, art must follow suit. I urged the room toward intentional co-creation—dancers in conversation with climate scientists, playwrights with coders, scenographers with data theorists, poets with psychiatrists—not to illustrate technology, but to interrogate tomorrow.
Speculative art, I insisted, is not escape but rehearsal. It is where societies test ethics and power, negotiate possible worlds, and allow audiences to experience futures before reality catches up.
My Sessions: Scientific WordBuilding and De-Risking Futures
Following the address, the Scientific World-Building session unfolded with remarkable energy. Together with fellow facilitators, we guided young writers as they mapped climate-altered geographies, constructed post-colonial AI governance systems, interrogated ancestral cosmologies in quantum space-time, and reimagined survival beyond ecological collapse. By the close, they were not merely inventing stories but engineering probability.
Later, I facilitated a breakout session on derisking science through fiction, using a speculative short story, Afrinewsia by Yazeed Dezele, as our narrative laboratory. Through it we interrogated green colonialism, cultural mutation, ecofascism, the elasticity of satire, and the politics of conservation. In those hours, speculation transcended literature; it became psychological, ecological, architectural, philosophical—a collective apparatus for future-making.
A Ceremony of New Worlds
At the opening ceremony of Aké the next day, the Nommo Awards were announced, placing Africa’s most visionary storytellers on the global speculative chart:
- Ilube Award for Best Novel: Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase
- Best Novella: Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
- Best Short Story: From Across Time by Chisom Umeh
- Best Graphic Novel: Celestial Eyes by John Uche and Francis
Muna Khogali, speaking for ASFS, described the winning works as “some of the most innovative, daring, and visionary storytelling coming out of Africa and the diaspora.” She was right. The festival halls, late-night conversations, and feverish programme sessions confirmed it. Aké 2025 did not just showcase speculative art; it announced a continental shift.
With ASFS’s increased global footprint—from Worldcon Seattle to the Applied African SF collaboration with Imperial College London and the University of Nairobi, alongside its transition into a CIC—African imagination is no longer peripheral. It is archived, codified, professionalised, and circulated under its own authority.
I agree with her. To the fact that, African speculative fiction is no longer knocking on the doors of world literature—it is redesigning the architecture. It insists that if the future is planetary, Africa must be co-author, not footnote.
Aké, The Thirteenth Edition
Aké is not merely a literary festival. It is a small republic of minds. Over 1,000 creatives have passed through its gates since inception, leaving ideas, ruptures, laughter, and argument behind. This year, I stood among them as facilitator and witness, finally breaking what I jokingly called my “Aké jinx.” Every hour was a collision of thought: performances, book conversations, a stunning film screening of Ema-Edosio-Deelen and Bayo Oduwole: When Nigeria Happens, and the poetry-and-palm wine closing that featured Kongi himself, Prof. Wole Soyinka, still radiant, reading a new poem on Fidel Castro at 100.
What I Carried Away
Some festivals end when the lights dim. Aké does not. Not this edition, and this is kudos to Lola Shoneyin and her team. Her anointing is worth tapping from.
I left Aké not weary, but lit from within. To teach is to be reshaped. To facilitate is to be sharpened. In that room of imaginations, I felt the continent pivoting, not softly, but with deliberate force.
On the flight back to Abuja, I wrote one quiet line:
Africa is not waiting for the future. Africa is writing it.
And before the wheels touched the runway, I had already begun the first lines of my debut speculative drama.