The 2024 Festival
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch
4 – 7 September 2024
Our third festival built on the momentum and successes of the first two, bringing together leaders from across sectors, disciplines and continents to address some of the most urgent questions of our time. We heard from two key developers of the just-released malaria vaccine, set to save hundreds of thousands of lives; examined the promises and risks of AI; explored what climate-positive growth could mean for our continent; and considered the complexities of creating new economic paths in Africa. But as a festival of hearts as well as minds, these conversations unfolded alongside Kwedam and isiXhosa recitations of haunting turn-of-the-century poems reeling from colonial impositions, an exploratory journey (with the aid of a grand piano) of more than a century of opera in Africa, and an ancient biblical text retold to shapeshift into our present day. As our festival director aptly said, “We are planting the seeds, and the forest will grow.”
The 2023 Festival
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, Stellenbosch
12th – 16th September 2023
Post-pandemic, the festival returned with refinements, and renewed purpose and vigour. Panel conversations included governance and its challenges, public education as our last best chance, and malnutrition as a problem that can and must be solved. Young writers received encouraging advice from a Nobel laureate, a Rwandan playwright discussed her work using art and theatre for healing, while a renowned South African composer explored the complicated and dark history of the beloved hymn “Amazing Grace.” As Willem de Vries reflected in the Daily Maverick, “Ultimately, Africa in the World brought an agenda deeply concerned with enhancing ways of living on the continent, structuring access to existing and new kinds of innovation, fostering problem-solving, and emboldening broad political will that affects societal change.”
The Inaugural Festival
Spier Wine Farm, Stellenbosch
3 – 7 September 2019
Africa In the World showcases ideas hiding in plain sight across all fields of human endeavor, whether cracking the malaria code, redesigning cities, delivering high quality public education at scale or outright hacking capitalism.
Great ideas come from everywhere, and Spier Wine Farm, amidst the rolling vineyards and mountains of the Cape Winelands, is exactly the place for surfacing them.
The inaugural festival explored ‘leapfrog’, how to go from 0-60 in record time, unshackled by legacy.