Brand New Season!

The internet is rife with discussions about african futurism and afrofuturism. Unfortunately the discussions are often not nuanced enough to take into consideration that indeed the future is African.

The next season of future lab Africa will explore the rapid developments of a sleeping formidable giant coming in the form of an African youth population. The series will explore how African “cultures of technology” are influencing the next generation of thinkers, artists, philosophers and scientists. The series hopes to be a time capsule (futurist archive) of a period in history that is exceptional in the rapidly changing demographic, internet revolution and the proliferation of globalized new media and its effect of a new form of digital pan-africanism. The series will also explore Africa’s digital legacy.

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Beginning in 2035, the number of young people reaching working age in Africa will exceed that of the rest of the world combined, and will continue every year for the rest of the century. By 2050, one in every four humans will be African. At the end of the century, nearly 40 percent of the world’s population will be African.

Salih Booker is the executive director of the Center for International Policy. Ari Rickman is a research fellow at the Center.

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The podcast series hopes to breed curiosity by inviting the youth to utilizes their imagination and think creatively with reckless abandon. The show is a call to explore African modes of science and technology outside of lab spaces and innovation labs. We seek to find what does technology, science, nature, the environment and the nature of experimentation really mean in the context of African people’s lived realities.

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To this day radio by far is the dominant mass medium in Africa. Unfortunately audio storytelling is largely unexplored in digital media outside the music industry. We want to invade the most intimate space, between your ears, with an audible treat that will inspire those led to our podcast to cultivate new ideas and also understand contemporary African issues of modernity. There is no specifications for the audience of this new art form we are speaking to current and future generations who are interested specifically about the future of African technology. The podcast is also designed to explore new forms of audio storytelling utilizing Africa’s rich history with radio. We are partnering up with experimental music and sound experts to host and record live call and response parties throughout African terrains.