Durban to get its own Essence festival
DURBAN is going to get its own unique, prestigious signature event that will attract international tourists and global attention – and generate employment for more than 3 000 local people.
There will also be indirect jobs created by the first Essence Festival Durban, a sister event to the massive annual Essence Festival New Orleans, in America, the largest multi-cultural live festival in the world. Durban and New Orleans are sister cities.
The local event, staged from November 8-13 at the Durban ICC and the Moses Mabhida Stadium, has been three years in the planning – and is a threeyear partnership with the influential American woman’s magazine Essence, part of Time Inc, whose stable includes Time Magazine and Fortune.
The Durban festival has been marketed in Essence for almost a year, and excitement is building, said Michelle Ebanks, the Essence president, who flew in for the launch at Coastlands on the Ridge Hotel yesterday.
“Everyone is energised. I can’t go anywhere in America without people talking about Durban,” she beamed.
Essence Festival Durban, free to the public, will include music and entertainment, lifestyle, health and wellness, food and drink, money and technology, books, arts, craft and design, and will be staged at the same time as the city’s successful Durban Business Fair – which aims to connect local businesses globally.
City manager S’bu Sithole said the overall budget for the event was R46 million. However, Sithole stressed that most of that came from previously allocated budgets.
“You can’t have a festival as big as this without investing money,” he said.
“The most important issue is the impact,” he said, explaining that as well as the 3 000-plus jobs and the indirect jobs that would be created, the economic impact on the city would be R250m.
More than 60 000 visitors were expected; the event would boost the city’s brand, “take Durban to the world”, while the public relations value would be huge, considering Time Inc’s global reach of more than 500 million people.
Head of Durban Tourism, Phillip Sithole, said they hoped the partnership with Essence would enable Durban to further infiltrate the US market and the rest of the African continent. America was already Durban’s largest source market for tourists.
The city had recently opened a destination marketing company in New York, had a partnership with the South African embassy in Washington, and with SAA in New York, while the Essence partnership had already enabled Durban to have an exhibition stand at this year’s Essence Festival New Orleans.
Special tour packages were already being marketed in America for the Durban festival.
eThekwini mayor Zandile Gumede told the Essence team that they “couldn’t have chosen a better place to host this prestigious festival… It complements Durban’s international image as an event capital.”
Local entertainment artists will be sharing the stage with an international line-up and Thando Nyomeni, of the KZN United Music Association, said that people could not yet fathom out how big the Durban festival would be.
Some of the talent at the festival will include Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Yolanda Adams, also from the US, who will perform in the Gospel Concert, with some of SA’s top artists already booked, including Thandiswa Mazwai, Black Coffee, Big NuSz, Babes Wodumo and DJ Zinhle.
Power and inspiration speakers will be author and radio personality, Steve Harvey, singer/songwriters, Kelly Price and Estelle and civil rights activist and TV/radio host, Rev Al Sharpton.
Yesterday’s festival launch also coincided with the start of Tourism Month.