In 2020, Azibuye – The Occupation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Created by South African filmmakers Dylan Valley, Ngako Mosiea, produced by Caitlin Robinson, and in partnership with Electric South, the VR documentary placed viewers inside a contested mansion in Johannesburg, one symbolically “occupied” by Black artists reclaiming land and memory in a country still reckoning with apartheid’s spatial legacies.
The project didn’t just tell a story. It created a space — one that blurred the boundaries between physical architecture, political resistance, and virtual immersion.
Across the African continent, creators are using immersive technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Extended Reality (XR) to build these kinds of spatial experiences rooted in African traditions, yet unbound by geography. The result is a growing movement many are calling Afro-Immersion: where ritual meets code, sound becomes architecture, and storytelling expands into interactive space.
Where architecture, ancestry, and audio collide
The African continent is not new to layered storytelling. Oral traditions, sonic rituals, and symbolic design have long conveyed history and cosmology. What’s new is the technology, and the creative ownership being taken to frame these stories digitally.
Organisations like Electric South (South Africa), BlackRhino VR (Kenya), and cultural incubators like the Fak’ugesi Festival are at the forefront of this shift. Their work spans across disciplines: one project might reconstruct a spiritual space using 3D modelling and field recordings; another might remix traditional instruments into an immersive concert experience in VR.
For example:
Electric South provides support and infrastructure for African artists working in immersive media. Their portfolio includes Nairobi Berries by Ng’endo Mukii, a poetic, Afrofuturist VR piece exploring identity and longing in Kenya’s capital.
BlackRhino VR, based in Nairobi, has documented urban life through 360° video, immersive journalism, and interactive installations. Their work ranges from VR experiences on Nairobi’s matatu culture to digital archives of endangered heritage sites.
Fak’ugesi Festival, held annually in Johannesburg, has launched dedicated XR programmes, including artist residencies, game jams, and exhibitions that experiment with virtual storytelling rooted in African culture. In 2021 and 2022, their XR tracks featured collaborations that fused animation, motion capture, and ritual symbolism.
Not just preservation – reimagination
Afro-Immersion is not about preserving culture in digital amber. It’s about reinterpreting and reclaiming African spaces, languages, and cosmologies using the tools of the future. XR is being used to animate myths, reconstruct erased spaces, and even simulate rituals once considered too sacred or transient to capture in any traditional format.
This work has political implications, too. Much of African history, particularly its built environments and spiritual geographies, has been misrepresented or erased by colonial archives. XR allows creators to challenge that legacy by centering community voices and subjective memory.
In that sense, immersive technology becomes not just a medium, but a form of cultural resistance.
A youth-led, continent-wide momentum
What’s notable is that this movement is largely youth-driven. African creatives under 35 are leading the charge, often with backgrounds that straddle gaming, fine art, architecture, and music. And they are working in collectives, not silos — sharing resources, building cross-border partnerships, and exhibiting their work globally.
Institutions like the French Institute of South Africa, Meta’s AR/VR Africa initiative, and Digital Lab Africa have helped provide training and exposure, but the momentum is coming from within.
The tools are becoming more accessible. Mobile AR apps, 360° video, and game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine are now widely available to creators on the continent. With a smartphone and some coding skills, it’s now possible to build a portal into a digital village, a memory archive, or a sound installation rooted in griot traditions.
