Aké Festival Champions ‘Native Intelligence’ For Its 14th Edition

The Aké Arts & Book Festival, one of Nigeria’s most prominent literary gatherings,  is returning to Lagos this November with one of its most timely themes yet. Founder Lola Shoneyin has announced that the 14th edition of the Aké Arts & Book Festival will take place from 19 to 21 November 2026, under the theme Native Intelligence, setting the stage for one of the first major cultural conversations from Africa about what it means to create, remember, and think in the age of artificial intelligence.

While conversations around Artificial Intelligence have largely centred on efficiency, automation, and technological possibility, Aké’s approach shifts the focus elsewhere. Rather than asking what artificial intelligence can do, the festival is asking what human intelligence must continue to protect. At a moment when Artificial Intelligence is reshaping education, publishing, media, and the creative industries, Native Intelligence argues for the enduring value of deep reading, cultural memory, indigenous knowledge, and original thought.

According to the festival’s announcement, this year’s theme will examine both the relationship and the tension between traditional forms of intelligence and rapidly evolving artificial intelligence. It also challenges audiences to consider how indigenous knowledge systems have long informed ways of thinking that technology is only now attempting to replicate, raising pressing questions about the origins, ownership, and future of knowledge itself.

The conversations will extend beyond technology to language, oral traditions, storytelling, politics, and creativity, exploring how communal ways of knowing interact with digital tools that increasingly shape the production and consumption of information. At the heart of the festival lies a question that feels especially urgent today: whose knowledge, histories, and experiences will shape the future as artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in everyday life?

It is a theme that feels particularly fitting for Aké. Since its founding, the festival has championed books, writers, and the slow, transformative work of reading at a time when attention spans continue to shrink. If previous editions have explored truth, identity, and freedom, Native Intelligence expands that conversation by making a case for the distinctly human qualities that literature continues to nurture: curiosity, empathy, imagination, and critical thought.

Now in its fourteenth year, Aké remains one of the continent’s defining cultural events. Organised by the Book Buzz Foundation, the festival has brought together more than 1,000 writers, poets, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and thinkers from Africa and beyond, while the foundation continues its broader mission to promote literacy and build a stronger reading culture across the continent. From 19 to 21 November, Lagos will once again become the meeting point for some of the most exciting literary and cultural voices from across Africa and its diaspora.