Ashraf Johaardien: The Name is an Imperative.

Fak’ugesi was born in 2014 from a collaboration between the Wits School of Arts’ Digital Arts Department and the Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct. The premise was direct. Put African cultural practice and technological innovation in the same room and see what sparks.

They needed a word for that, one that could do the work of an instruction. They found it in street Zulu.

Fak’ugesi.

Faka, to put in, to insert, to add. Ugesi, electricity, power. Switch on. Add power. The name was given to the festival at its founding in 2014 by entrepreneur Shonisani Lethole. Wits’ own account of the founding describes him as the person who initially named the festival, a kind, generous and inspiring entrepreneur and friend of industry.

Festivals like to mythologize their own names. They become branding exercises, origin stories smoothed out until no one person is responsible and everyone can claim them. Fak’ugesi resisted that, almost by accident.

Lethole was not an academic inside the institution naming a project. He stood at the intersection the festival was built to hold, industry, entrepreneurship and the creative ecosystem forming around Wits and Tshimologong in those early years. He was part of the circuit the festival wanted to wire together.

The precise circumstances of how he was asked are not documented, and there is no need to invent them. What the record does support is clear. The name came from him. One man’s word, offered to a project at its beginning.

Provenance here matters because it stops a name from floating free. It anchors it to a person, to a moment, to a choice. Without that, Fak’ugesi could be anything, a clever pun about load shedding, a metaphor about Africa’s digital future, a headline that writes itself. With it, it is something more specific. A gift. A contribution from someone who understood the project before it had an audience.

In Johannesburg, names are never just names. They are instructions. Shonisani Lethole died on 29 June 2020, at Tembisa Hospital, after two days without food and a tweet to the Health Minister that went unanswered in time. A later Health Ombudsman’s report found the hospital had failed him badly. The name he gave the festival outlived him. So, it turned out, did the questions about how he was cared for. Faka. Ugesi. is not a description of what the festival is. It is a description of what it does. You do not attend Fak’ugesi to watch power. You attend to plug into it.

When creatives gather in Braamfontein each year, they are not plugging into a wall socket. They are ukufaka ugesi, inserting current into the global grid on their own terms. Technology here is not a cold import. It is a live wire, pulled through the city’s veins.

There’s an older current worth reaching for here too, even if the reach is mine and not the record’s. Long before pixel shaders and generative AI, this city ran on a different kind of fire, call it umlilo, the hearth. Fak’ugesi takes that fire and gives it a circuit board to run through. It asks what happens when ancestral spark meets motherboard, when storytelling becomes a power source of its own.

And yes, there is the obvious Johannesburg joke. While the national grid stutters, Fak’ugesi does exactly what its name says. Switch on. The joke only works for a second. The festival has never been about keeping the lights on despite Eskom. The city’s most reliable power source was creative hustle, never anything municipal. The name predates the crisis. It will outlive it.

Four Festival Directors have carried Fak’ugesi through the twelve years since, and each, asked separately, remembers something specific rather than something general. A fifth year, 2021, belongs to dillion s. phiri, brought in as curator rather than director, steering the festival’s pandemic-era pivot under that year’s own theme, Build Coz You Have To.

For Christo Doherty, it comes down to the switch flipping, the festival’s actual founding, tying the name he helped bring into a Braamfontein building to what the name has always literally meant. Tegan Bristow names ownership as the turn, the moment the festival stopped being run for a community and started being claimed by one, community and culture built on the community’s own terms rather than borrowed ones. Eduardo Cachucho holds onto a different image entirely, recognition landing on people’s faces at the first Fak’ugesi Awards, an industry finding its own name reflected back at it for the first time, seen becoming the thing it was already becoming. Alby Michaels, the current director, carries a title that runs to seven roles on his own bio, festival director, director, designer, dramaturge, curator, producer, arts administrator, writes:

“A festival is not only what happens when the doors open. It is the network of people, ideas, practices and relationships that makes those moments possible.”

Four different vantage points, one thread underneath all of them. Each one names a specific person’s specific memory of a specific moment where something crystallized, not the vague momentum or borrowed vibe an industry usually reaches for instead, no different in kind from Lethole handing over a word in 2014, at the very beginning, to people who had not yet decided what to call what they were building.

Provenance runs both directions. Backward, to the man who named it. Forward, through everyone who has kept the name honest since.

African innovation is often talked about as if it emerges without authors, as community, as energy, as vibe. Fak’ugesi is a useful corrective. It had an author for its name. We know who he was. To use the name without naming him is to take the power without acknowledging where it was added from.

Fak’ugesi still runs on that original instruction.

Faka. Ugesi.

Switch on.

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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