Africa in the World festival kicks off

From September 4-7, continental and global guests will gather for Stellenbosch’s third Africa In the World festival. Started in 2019, paused for Covid-19 and resumed in 2023, the festival gathers thinkers and doers, disrupters and builders, contrarians and conciliators — intellectuals, innovators, politicians, activists, public servants, businesspeople, scientists, musicians, poets and priests — with aims to answer Africa’s challenges through inspiration and brilliance.

Pulitzer Prize winning Dele Olojede, the festival's founder, describes the festival as “inviting the world’s brightest to the African continent to engage the brightest African leaders in all fields of human endeavour in dialogue, about how to make progress”.

The festival foregrounds conversation as a conductor for managing the world’s complexities.

The multi-awarded speakers billed for the 2024 festival include scientists Prof Sir Adrian Hill, Dr Ally Olotu, Prof Tulio de Oliveira and Prof Salim Abdool Karim. Among them they have tackled HIV/Aids, Dengue, SARS-CoV-2, Zika, Yellow Fever Virus, Ebola and Malaria. Leaders in business include Standard Bank group chair Nonkululeko Nyembezi; founder and CEO of Onafriq Daré Okoudjou; and founder and CEO of Africa Climate Ventures James Irungu Mwangi. There’s also the Nigerian minister of communications, innovation and digital economy Dr Bosun Tijani and Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis.

The 2023 festival attracted two Nobel Literature Laureates, an economist who steered one of the world’s largest economies to its future, a social entrepreneur inspired to create a business that rescues millions from malnutrition, a poet whose every day work heals the wounds left by genocide and a scientist pioneering life-saving breakthrough technologies, among other thought leaders.

Festival director Dr Sizakele Marutlele said the objectives were to have its attendees elevate their estimation and expectations of themselves.

A 2023 highlight was having the Nobel prize winning Wole Soyinka in dialogue with Stellenbosch University students.

He encouraged them to “know that you can turn yourself into a hand-held transmission device, you can make yourself part of a strong network for change”.

“If you don’t develop your own voice, you do yourself a disservice,” Soyinka said. The grey-haired in the audience also took notes.

Everyone chuckled at his self-deprecating comments about his fame as the continent’s most recognised writer, and his well-known aversion to selfies: “It is not that I don’t enjoy meeting people, I just enjoy meeting them as someone else. I am not antisocial; I just don’t enjoy the burden of being Wole Soyinka,” he said.

Another Nobel-winner, Zanzibarian Abdulrazak Gurnah, reflected that his life’s work had been to show that it is possible to “retrieve something out of experience and trauma”.

“Traumatic events need not mean the end; we are able to retrieve something,” he said.

Festival speakers are united by the ethos and determination to find solutions while holding the courage to confront the continent’s pain, the misdeeds of its exploiters and a deep passion for humanity. Africa in the World is a festival of thought and joy, mind and heart.

The 2024 festival promises to inspire, challenge and provide hope.