In Viwe Mfaku’s Qula Olympics, an isiXhosa practice of stick fighting enters a speculative arena. The boys in the imagined rite meet a master robot, and a local form of learning becomes an event that could belong to a future world. The premise is vivid enough to register at once, but it carries a careful question. If a tradition continues to change with the people who practice it, what might it become when technology enters its frame? Mfaku does not treat the answer as a loss of authenticity. His image proposes continuity through invention.
Mfaku is a South African visual artist and creative director whose ISINTU project began with an Afro science-fiction exhibition in 2022 and continued with a second season of paintings in 2024. He grew up in a Xhosa family in Gcuwa, also known as Butterworth, in the Eastern Cape. The word isintu points toward ways of being and cultural practice. In his account of the project, it is both an artistic movement and a way to ask whether African knowledge, taste and invention can set the terms of a future rather than appear as relics inside someone else’s future.
He discusses Afrofuturism, but names his own interest more precisely as Afro Sci-fi. That distinction helps keep the work close to its South African sources. His speculative scenes are not general emblems of a continent. They begin with named practices, languages and histories, then ask how those materials might operate in an alternate technological order. Qula Olympics takes a particular rite and changes its setting. The resulting tension gives the work more force than an image made by simply attaching a machine to an African-looking costume.
A ritual meets a machine
The stick-fighting premise in Qula Olympics could easily become a contest between past and future, with the robot standing for progress and the human participants standing for tradition. Mfaku’s account is more interesting. In a 2024 GQ interview, he says the piece asks how rites of passage can evolve and appear on a world stage. The robot is part of that thought experiment. It changes the conditions under which skill and knowledge are tested, while the human practice remains the reason the image exists.
The title adds another layer. An Olympics implies spectators, rules, ceremony and international recognition. A practice often understood through local transmission becomes publicly visible at a different scale. That visibility can be exciting, but it also changes the practice’s social position. Mfaku’s image leaves room to ask what is gained when a rite is brought into a global arena, and what must remain under the care of the community that gives it meaning. The speculative setting is therefore a tool for considering a real tension in cultural change.
His account of Qula Olympics does not suggest that an actual Xhosa rite ought to be replaced by a robot fight. Art can make a hypothetical situation hold several ideas at once. The master machine turns a familiar relationship between learner and elder into a visible confrontation with technology. It lets a viewer ask whether a machine can carry inherited standards, or whether the important part of a rite lies in human relationships that no apparatus can reproduce. The painting’s future is a question addressed to the present.
ISINTU asks such questions through recognizable characters. Mfaku’s earlier 2022 exhibition interview with VISI discussed Nongqawe, an oil-on-canvas humanoid work that imagines the consciousness of Nongqawuse uploaded as an operating system. Nongqawuse is a figure whose nineteenth-century history remains charged in South African memory. Mfaku’s image does not pretend that a technological upload can settle historical argument. It stages an encounter with a contested person and asks what a contemporary retelling might allow her to say or become.
There is a danger in treating historical people as raw material for futuristic entertainment. Mfaku’s stated motivation is to challenge inherited simplifications about icons and villains. The operating-system conceit makes interpretation visible. An OS organizes what a device can do; a public story organizes what a later generation thinks a historical figure could have meant. By imagining a different system, the artist asks whether the story itself can be reconsidered. The painting cannot resolve the history, but it can interrupt the habit of repeating one interpretation without examining it.
Carrying a different weight
Another 2022 work, Thwele Iswag, offers a different register. Mfaku described it to VISI as a woman carrying a collection of fashionable sneakers on her head. Its title reworks an expression about carrying a heavy burden into a phrase about carrying swag. This change could sound merely playful until one sees the question behind it: what does a society repeatedly ask its members to carry, and how might that language shape their sense of possibility?
The woman’s posture draws on a familiar image of carrying, but the load is unexpected. Sneakers are objects of style, desire and commerce, not water or household necessity. The substitution makes the viewer notice how quickly an image of a person bearing weight can be read as a story of struggle. Mfaku wants to change the expectation before it hardens. He does not deny hardship; he refuses to make it the only interpretive frame available to the figure.
The work is also alert to the uneasy social life of style. Sneakers can signal aspiration and status, yet they are produced and sold within global systems that do not distribute wealth equally. To carry them as an emblem of self-possession is both an assertion and a question. Who can choose the symbols through which they appear? Who is carrying whose idea of sophistication? Thwele Iswag gains its energy from the fact that the load can be read as celebration, pressure or both.
Mfaku’s background in visual design and advertising helps explain the directness of this image. He understands how a phrase and a figure can become legible at a glance. In his personal art, that skill is put to a different task. A commercial image often tries to end thought with an immediate desire. Thwele Iswag begins with an immediate recognition and then opens an argument about language, class and self-image. The first reading is fast; the second takes longer.
The artist has said that ISINTU grew partly from frustration with portrayals of Africa as lacking sophistication. This concern runs through both Nongqawe and Thwele Iswag, though the images use different means. One gives a historical figure a technological afterlife; the other alters a contemporary expression about burden. In each, a preexisting story is reopened. Speculation becomes less a genre setting than a method for asking who wrote the first version and what another version might make possible.
The painted future
Oil paint was already part of ISINTU’s first season: Mfaku identified Nongqawe as oil on canvas in his 2022 VISI interview. The 2024 exhibition account describes seven works in the second season, made in oil painting with deep red and pink tones. Mfaku told GQ that his emphasis on oil in this series was intentional. At a moment when AI imagery had become widespread, he wanted the works to feel physically present and individually made.
The renewed emphasis is a reminder that speculative art need not be produced with the newest medium. An oil painting can imagine an android; a painted surface can picture a world built through advanced technology. The contrast draws attention to the labor of imagining. Layers of paint take time to make, and their texture can suggest a body or atmosphere differently from a printed image. Mfaku did not abandon digital tools as illegitimate. He gave the later paintings a material weight suited to their subjects.
Color changed with the medium. In his VISI interview, Mfaku said he wanted deliberately loud color instead of an expected muted palette for African art. He imagined the works as if they could form a backdrop for a science-fiction film set on the continent. The strong reds and pinks reported in the second season turn that ambition into an atmosphere. Warmth and urgency become part of the world-building. These are not neutral backgrounds behind futuristic figures; they influence how a viewer feels the possibility of the scene.
The 2024 painting Ookhokho makes the relation between medium and subject particularly clear. GQ describes towering droid ancestors in the work. The image uses a machine-body to consider inherited presence. An ancestor here is neither simply a ghost from the past nor a data file stored in a device. The speculative form gives ancestry scale and a new visual vocabulary. The question becomes what an inherited wisdom might look like if it could appear in a future city as a body with its own power.
This is distinct from Nongqawe’s operating-system premise. There, one historical consciousness is imagined within a humanoid device. In Ookhokho, the ancestors form a larger presence, described as towering. Scale changes the relationship between the viewer and the figure. The audience may feel small before inherited knowledge, while the futuristic casing prevents the scene from becoming a conventional monument. It is an image of authority still subject to reinvention.
A South African future in the plural
Mfaku’s work is rooted in a Xhosa upbringing, but ISINTU is framed as an invitation to think about African futures more broadly. That movement between the particular and the continental needs care. No painting can stand for every African culture or prescribe a common future. The strongest works remain attached to the things Mfaku can name: a rite, a phrase, a historical person, an ancestral relation. From those starting points, viewers can ask analogous questions about their own places and histories without treating the first source as interchangeable with another.
The artist’s commercial career provides another perspective on the question. He has worked as a creative director in advertising and entertainment, and has described frustration with how little time formal production can allow for experiment. Independent painting gave him a space to make images whose purpose was not set by a client’s immediate campaign. Yet his experience in public communication remains visible. ISINTU is intended to move beyond a gallery wall into design, fashion, architecture and other parts of everyday life. Mfaku calls it a creative mental model as well as an art movement.
Those ambitions are broader than the completed paintings, and the distinction matters to the viewer. Qula Olympics, Nongqawe, Thwele Iswag and Ookhokho can be encountered as actual works with specific propositions. The larger ISINTU vision tells us how Mfaku hopes their ideas might travel. One need not assume that every proposed application has already been built to take the paintings seriously. The images are strong because their speculative scenarios already make an argument in visual form.
The 2024 season also included family-themed titles such as uTata neNtombi and uNina noNyana, reproduced in a contemporary account of the exhibition. Their presence beside droid ancestors and technological rites indicates the breadth of Mfaku’s world. Family relations remain central in a future saturated with invented machines. Science fiction is often fascinated by devices that appear to make human dependency obsolete. ISINTU keeps parent, child and ancestor within the same imaginative field as the robot.
Mfaku has described the second season as an alternative to an Africa whose future is pictured chiefly through deprivation. The choice of oil paint supports that position in a material way. These are not placeholders for a product that might be manufactured later. They are finished, worked surfaces asking viewers to spend time with an invented setting. The red and pink tonal field gives a scene warmth before its technological details are decoded. In Ookhokho, the towering droid ancestors join that warmth to an imposing scale. The conjunction stops the machine from becoming a cold emblem of replacement. It can be read as a vessel for memory, even while its invented engineering remains beyond any present device. The painting’s question about ancestral presence depends on both parts of that conjunction.
Krull’s conversation about futuristic dreams in the Congo diaspora gives readers another view of how future images can grow from particular experiences and inheritances. Mfaku’s paintings make that question unusually concrete. What if an ancestor were a towering droid? What if a rite faced a master robot? What if a young woman carried style where an old phrase expected burden? Each proposal changes one element and lets the consequences spread through the rest of the image.
The power of ISINTU lies in that controlled change. Mfaku does not ask viewers to forget a Xhosa word or a South African history in order to enter the future. He uses them as the future’s starting materials. His work is most compelling when a figure carries a recognizable past into an unfamiliar setting and remains more than either one. Qula Olympics is an emblem of the method: the robot is striking, but the lasting question belongs to the people deciding what knowledge, skill and transformation should mean in a world they are still making.