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About Shoko 2025

Zimbabwe’s dopest festival of urban culture is back! Shoko Festival is set to celebrate its 15 Year Anniversary in raucous style from 25th to 27th September 2025 in Harare and Chitungwiza under the banner XV: The Legacy. We’re gonna be celebrating a decade and a half of artistic innovation, creative freedom, and the evolution of urban culture in Zimbabwe and beyond!

The festival kicks off with an epic Shoko Comedy Night headlined by internationally acclaimed comedian King Kandoro alongside Kenya’s witty satirist, Justine Wanda. Shoko Festival’s popular Mash Up Night will be headlined by South African Music Awards (SAMA) award-winning rapper, Reason AKA Sizwe Alakine, UK’s breakthrough rapper, OneDa, Zim hip hop star Sane Wav and legendary producer Take Fizzo. Meanwhile the main event Peace In The Hood will shut it all down with performances from Zim Hip Hop giant, Bagga, Young Fantan, Zim Hip Hop 2024 Best Newcomer Runna Rulez, rising Zim Dancehall chanter Madedido, and chart-topper Jnr Spragga.

The festival week opens with the Hub UnConference running under the theme Decolonise the Internet convening African thought leaders to challenges colonial legacies embedded in internet infrastructure and biased AI while calling on Africans to reclaim our digital narratives. Also happening on the sidelines of Shoko 2025 is Green Cities Expo - running under the theme Reclaim our Future, it will bring together youth, artists, and communities to build greener, just cities from the ground up.

So come through to Shoko 2025 to enjoy, to learn, to thrive and to celebrate 15 years of thumping urban culture with us!

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About Shoko Festival

Founded in 2011, Shoko Festival is Zimbabwe’s longest running festival of urban culture. Shoko is a celebration of free expression, cutting edge urban art and alternative youth culture. Each year Shoko attracts over 20,000 young people, making it the biggest hip hop event in the country. The festival is a platform for hip hop, stand-up comedy, spoken word and urban music and serves as a powerful launchpad for alternative young artists with an important message. Known for being a socially conscious festival, Shoko creates a critical free space in Zimbabwe for new expression and bold ideas and has provided a platform for over one thousand Zimbabwean artists over the years. The festival is also a vibrant platform for collaboration - intentionally curating collaborations between local talent and international artists leading to multiple international tours & record deals for urban Zimbabwean artists over the last decade and a half.

Shoko also creates a free space for debate of radical news ideas around social justice, climate action & African liberation with its Hub Unconference and Green Cities Expo events. The Hub Unconference is the country’s leading annual gathering on digital media,, civic tech and the creative economy. Meanwhile Green Cities Expo is a thriving creative space for discussion, exhibitions and artivism for climate justice and the imagining of a just, green, low carbon future for Africa.

Through music, art, creative climate activism and digital culture, Shoko continues to inspire a new generation to dream, create and build a better future!

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