FORETOLD: Archives from the Future

It’s 2177, we’re living in a post-Information War future where humans have harnessed boundless advances in technology and consciousness, guided by an obsession with futurism. From endless algorithmic nudging and auction of our attention, a century’s overabundance of content has wrecked any remaining coherent picture of a shared, verifiable strand of reality or truth. The Chatter: the exabytes of information, simulations, and counternarratives blurs any coherent timeline on where Africans came from. Devoted to existential questions of Africa’s real legacy, Yaa, a young digital archaeologist with a penchant for history is challenged to salvage relevant and urgent histories of her ancestors, traveling in time-- and consciousness, to piece together digital artifacts in order to unearth who Africans were and have become. With her loyal AI assistant, Yaa travels through dimensions and scenarios to claim and weave stories of the continent’s past; hoping to uncover what can take us back to our redeeming qualities...  Foretold visits the limitless potential of Africa's future by looking forward to in order to look back...

In Season One, Yaa’s excavating surfaces these exciting scenarios: 

• post-pandemic health scapes.
• artificial intelligence in population control: health, infrastructure, and connectivity.
• Asia and Africa’s competitive rise to global domination.
• the future of land ownership and collectivity in Africa.
• the new economies of cryptocurrency: in sports.
• women’s roles in shifting gender-based violence.
• re-imagining tribalism, new political orders, and cooperation.
• heritage, language, translation, and linguistic evolutions on the continent.
• queering the continent: gender identity in flux. transformative micro-economies and new banking.
• television and screens as emergent expressive modes.

“FORETOLD” is a unique podcast series from the near and distant future. For each episode, we take on a possible (or plausible) future scenario in Africa. The episodes feature commentary and interviews with fictional personalities and companies from around the continent focusing on all aspects of Africa’s technological advancement. Foretold is a part time-travel and part storytelling podcast. It will showcase ideas that could inspire this generation to shape Africa’s future, inducing self-fulfilling prophecies. We invite thinkers, creatives, and writers to submit ideas and storylines that will be featured in the podcast series.