Ashraf Johaardien: Imagination is easy to invoke but harder to sustain.

There is a moment in any conversation about African technology and innovation when someone says, with conviction, that imagination is the answer. Africa’s future, they argue, lies not in following existing models but in imagining alternatives.

The proposition is appealing. It is also dangerously easy.

Imagination can become one of those words that means everything and therefore very little. It can stand for optimism, creativity, speculation, invention, ambition. It can be invoked whenever we want to talk about a better future without having to describe what that future might actually require.

So I have learned to pause at the word.

This is what makes Fak’ugesi’s 2026 programme interesting. Across five days, from 13 to 17 October, the festival moves through three curatorial frequencies. Thursday 15 October is given to the Imagination Engines. Cabanga is not simply a theme attached to a collection of events. It gives imagination enough weight to ask a harder question: what does imagination actually do?

The proposition I want to test is this: imagination precedes innovation. Not always chronologically. Innovation does not always begin with someone imagining a finished solution. Sometimes necessity produces invention. Existing technologies are repurposed. Constraints produce ingenuity.

But before something can become an innovation, some possibility has to become conceivable. That is where the Imagination Engines become interesting.

The day begins with Dr Benjamin Rossman asking why Africa must help invent the Intelligence Century. The question is larger than whether Africa will adopt artificial intelligence. Who gets to define intelligence itself? Can African participation in AI mean more than becoming an efficient consumer of systems designed elsewhere?

That is an imaginative question before it is an innovation question.

The Art in Artificial Intelligence panel moves the problem into creative practice, asking about the artist as orchestrator and what happens when AI becomes part of the process. Authorship shifts. The artist’s role shifts. Technology is no longer simply a tool waiting to be used.

Then comes “Same Prompt, Different Planet”. Dagmar Schürrer and Renzo Filinich Orozco encounter the same machine and produce radically different practices. The programme deliberately makes room for failure, unexpected breakthroughs and moments when the machine refuses to behave.

The point is not that AI produces different images. It is that the people using it bring different worlds to the machine. A shared technology does not produce a shared imaginary.

Filinich Orozco takes the question somewhere stranger with “The Ecology of Collapsing Meaning: Plant-Guided Language Evolution and Machine Hallucination”, bringing AI, plant intelligence, sound, ecology and emergent language into the same field. Whether or not one accepts all its premises, the gesture is clear. It changes the boundaries of the problem.

This may be what imagination does before innovation. It does not provide the answer. It changes the question.

That becomes more consequential in Dr Tsosheletso Chidi’s “The Languages We Imagine into the Future”. The issue is not whether African languages can be added to existing systems. It is whether language changes the systems themselves.

Whose knowledge enters the machine? Whose concepts become legible? What forms of thought are lost when technology is designed around languages and assumptions that are not ours?

This is where “African imaginaries” becomes more than a geographical label. An imaginary is not African simply because it was produced on the continent. It is shaped by the conditions from which it emerges. Language matters. History matters. So do access, infrastructure and the systems available to the people doing the imagining.

The same prompt can produce different worlds because the person holding the prompt is not interchangeable.

That specificity matters.

It also exposes a problem with treating imagination as an infinite resource. We often speak about African creativity as though imagination were abundant and infrastructure were the deficit. But imagination itself requires conditions.

Time. Access. Tools. Education. Connectivity. Money. Audiences. Spaces where unfinished ideas can exist without immediately having to justify themselves as products.

A festival can create some of those conditions. It can convene people, put artists and technologists into contact, provide tools and create spaces for experimentation and public encounter. It can make room for ideas that have not yet become products, pitches or polished propositions.

But that infrastructure is necessarily partial.

A festival cannot solve the material conditions within which people continue to work. It can, however, temporarily alter them. For a few days, different people, disciplines, technologies and questions occupy the same space.

That makes “initialise” more than a technological flourish. To initialise is to bring a system into a state of readiness. Before anything runs, something has to be configured. Perhaps a festival can do something similar for imagination. Not manufacture it. Not guarantee innovation. Not predict a future.

Initialise it.

Create the conditions in which an artist can encounter a machine differently. Where a language can enter a technological conversation on its own terms. Where an unfinished idea can be tested publicly. Where three people given the same prompt can produce three different worlds.

And here the proposition I began with becomes less certain, but more useful. Imagination does not always precede innovation in time. Innovation emerges through necessity, accident, adaptation and constraint. But imagination may precede innovation in another sense. It expands the field of what can be recognised as possible.

That makes imagination less like the first step in a production line and more like the field in which possibility is negotiated. Perhaps that is what Fak’ugesi’s Imagination Engine asks us to consider. Not whether imagination will produce the next innovation, but what kinds of innovation become possible when imagination is given somewhere to happen.

Before the prototype.

Before the product.

Before the pitch.

Before anyone knows what to call the thing being made.

The question is not whether imagination comes first.

It is whether we have built enough conditions for it to begin.

Ashraf Johaardien is the Resident Writer at the Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e. Creative
https://fakugesi.co.za/

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