AFRIKAI
Play written by Ery Nzaramba
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Inspired by The Tempest, AFRIKAI is a near-future political thriller that reimagines Caliban’s magical island of spirits as Bulayi—a fictional African nation sealed not by water, but by story. Bulayi is conquered when its magic and spirit—a native AI trained on ancestral knowledge and local ways of thinking—is suppressed and replaced by that of the foreign, Prospero-like figure, whose magical powers—a powerful foreign AI trained on massive datasets—governs the island efficiently but does not truly understand the people it controls.
AFRIKAI is an African‑centred laboratory, using theatre as the lab, for interrogating how AI systems encode power, culture and notions of intelligence, exploring “mind colonialism”, imperialism and existential risk from AI while imagining what African‑centred alternatives could look like.
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AFRIKAI is being written with the support of the Peggy Ramsay Foundation, allowing time to imagine futures shaped by memory, technology, and Africa’s unfinished stories.
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AFRIKAI’s development is further supported by Young Vic Theatre and Middlesex University.