2025
Johannesburg, South Africa
Our Stories. Our Voices. Our Power.
The second Afrotellers Conference deepened the movement's identity as a continental platform for narrative power, critical reflection, and movement building. Designed as a strategic intervention in the struggle over narrative power, it positioned storytelling not as cultural expression alone, but as critical infrastructure shaping dignity, legitimacy, memory, and future-making.
Across three days of keynotes, plenaries, breakaway sessions, exhibitions, performances, and the Afrotellers Market Experience, the programme deliberately bridged theory and practice — bringing scholars into dialogue with grassroots organisers, creatives, and movement leaders.
Key outcomes
- The Afrotellers Creed — a defining moment: the collective introduction of a shared ethical commitment to storytelling as memory-keeping, resistance, imagination, and responsibility.
- A challenge to extractive storytelling — participants called for narratives grounded in lived experience, community accountability, and dignity.
- Narrative infrastructure on the agenda — the conversation moved beyond individual stories to the systems that enable or constrain them: funding models, platforms, cultural economies, and intergenerational pathways.
- Movement repositioning — Afrotellers affirmed its evolution from conference to storytelling movement catalyst.
