Native Intelligence: Lola Shoneyin on Whose Knowledge Builds the Future ahead of the 14th Aké Festival

The 14th Aké Arts and Book Festival runs from Thursday 19 to Saturday 21 November at Silkwood Hotel (formerly Bon Hotel), 261 Sobo Arobiodu Street, Ikeja GRA.

Lola Shoneyin sat at Ouida Bookstore in Opebi on Thursday, 29 October, and did what she has done for thirteen previous editions: briefing the press on what to expect from the next edition of the Ake Arts and Book Festival.

Sitting alongside Donatus Okpako of Sterling Bank, she promised a festival that would be both denser and more pointed than usual.

The 14th Aké Arts and Book Festival runs from Thursday 19 to Saturday 21 November at Silkwood Hotel (formerly Bon Hotel), 261 Sobo Arobiodu Street, Ikeja GRA.

Arriving at this year’s theme

The theme for this year is Native Intelligence. Themes, Lola explained, are “a mixture of an idea that I might have, which often is rooted in something I’ve seen or something that’s happening around me. It’s also what is meaningful to my team.”

“It means something to us in Nigeria when we talk about native intelligence,” she said. “There’s the intelligence that comes from education. Then there’s the intelligence from the people. Like it’s innate. It comes from some sort of wisdom.”

She argued that the educated have grown condescending toward this other intelligence. “Those of us who are educated, have come to believe that our own intelligence that we have garnered and gained in school is the only kind of intelligence. Forgetting that even just 150 years ago our people were surviving, they were thriving, they were living, they were creating, they were inventing before the advent of formal education.”

The festival, she said, is a chance to ask whether the balance has been lost, and what disappears when proverbs, praise poetry, oral history, craft, ritual, and the way communities organise themselves are left out of what gets recorded and taught to machines.

The programme

As usual, the Ake Arts and Book festival is packed with exciting activities, from Wanjiru Koinange and Angela Wachuka screening How to Build a Library, a film about their work renovating and restoring libraries in Kenya, to Wana Udobang hosting Dami Ajayi, Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu, Chukky Ibe, Maryam Bukar, and D’bi Anitafrica.

Nnedi Okorafor, winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, will be discussing her new novel Death of the Author on Saturday, sharing the stage with Wole Talabi (The Fist of Memory), who won the 2024 Ilube Nommo Award for Best Novel for Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon.

Chika Unigwe, who won the 2012 Nigeria Prize for Literature for On Black Sisters’ Street, Igoni Barrett, Nnamdi Ehirim, and Rukiyatu Brume are among the other authors present. Shoneyin described many of them as sitting at “the very end of the third generation of Nigerian authors and the beginning of the fourth generation.”

Two new books launch at the festival itself. On Thursday, Ojoma Ochai will present Communities, Networks, Ecosystems: Why They Fail and How to Build Them, alongside Tara Fela-Durotoye, author of Building Beyond You, with Maryam Laushi hosting.

On Saturday, Khadija Yusra Sanusi will discuss her debut The Most Unremarkable Things, alongside Chika Unigwe, with Amyn Bawa-Allah hosting.

Partnerships and the AI conversation

Partnerships shape several of the panels. The African Speculative Fiction Society will present the 2026 Nommo Awards, Africa’s leading prize for speculative fiction, at the opening ceremony on Thursday.

Three Aké guests are shortlisted for the Ilube Award for Best Novel: Nnedi Okorafor (One Way Witch), Marvellous Michael Anson (Firstborn of the Sun), and Nkereuwem Albert (The Bone River). That same morning, the ASFS panel The Future of Creative Work with Artificial Intelligence will bring together Jerry Falade, Marvellous Michael Anson, and Osahon Ize-Iyamu, hosted by Jude Umeh.

Shoneyin was blunt about why Falade is there. “We’ve had this kind of conversation before, but it has become very important because of what has happened to people like Jerry Falade, who allegedly won a contract, a book deal worth $2 million. And suddenly we’re hearing that that has been withdrawn because of these allegations of him using artificial intelligence to write his book, which of course we know is a lie.”

She linked the wider pattern of such accusations against Black and brown writers to a failure of recognition: “I think it’s because they forget that many of us have a language behind the English that we speak, which inevitably influences the way that we speak English. And they don’t get it, but they will get it.”

Past winners of the Caine Prize for African Writing Irenosen Okojie (2020) and Rotimi Babatunde (2012) will join Jowhor Ile for the panel discussion Memory, Myth and the Machine. On Saturday the festival will marks the publication of Granta 177: Nigeria, an issue featuring non-fiction, fiction, poetry, photography, and interviews with Nigerians.

Building institutions here

When quizzed on the fragile position of emerging African voices, such as high submission fees made worse by exchange rates, and the new suspicion that distinctive English means AI or plagiarism, Shoneyin’s answer was clear. “Why is it that we measure our success by how, whether or not we are published in the West? Is Burna Boy’s success measured by whether he’s being listened to in America or Wizkid? We made him here. It started here and that’s what it should be for literature as well.”

She pointed to the work already happening locally. “As far as I am concerned, what we are doing at Ouida, what Masobe is doing, what Narrative Landscape is doing, that’s the answer to some of these issues… I’m interested in who is being published here. I’m interested in the people that are doing the publishing here. I’m interested in our own standards. I’m interested in us making literary giants right from here without the West saying to us this is how we are supposed to write.”

English, she said, is simply a tool. “As you are using it, beat it, kick it, headbutt it, slam it and mould it into whatever shape you have. It was foisted on you. Now it’s your turn to do what you like with it. And anybody who wants to complain, let them complain.”

Partners and support

Donatus Okpako of Sterling Bank described the partnership as long-standing and practical. The theme, he said, extends that commitment: artificial intelligence is now central to education, and the festival offers a place to examine how African knowledge sits inside it. “As a bank, we are very much aware of how this will impact our country because we must do everything that we can in our powers to create the knowledge gap that exists. And the only way you can bridge that is through education.” He emphasized meaningful experiences for attendees and the mutual value of the collaboration.

Lola Shoneyin also announced that the Lagos State Government is funding 100 book grants of ₦20,000 each for young people under 25, redeemable at the festival bookstore. Applications are open through the form shared on the festival’s channels; age is the key criterion. “To have the government of the host city on board seems like a small thing, but it’s actually huge.” She singled out Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and Dr. Oreoluwa Finnih-Awokoya (SA on SDGs), a book lover herself, for recognising the cultural density of the ember months and prioritising the arts.