Listening to the book
A ‘family secret’ shared by the thousands who attended, Festac ’77’s influence is immeasurable
The most immediate trigger for the Festac ‘77 project was the failure of South Africa’s World Cup in 2010. It is a story that begins in the diaspora and moves to the continent with the wave of independence — first in Ghana in 1958 with the All African Peoples Conference. These gatherings take a cultural slant with the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Fesman) in 1966 in Dakar, and eight years later at the Pan-african Cultural Festival (Panaf) in Algiers. Festac ’77 in Lagos marked the closing of this “festival decade”.
Each of these festivals is remembered as a singular moment in the history of the country in which it took place. Always the first of its kind and ideologically dissonant. Whereas Dakar ’66 manifested as a platform for Negritude’s ideals of black culture, Panaf ’69, mandated by the OAU [Organisation of African Unity], looked to culture as a tool of liberation and development. They functioned as laboratories for the development of new, worldwide politics and cultures. Their aim was to look beyond the binaries established by the cold and hot wars (East-west, North-south), and give form to universalisms that had emerged since the Haitian revolution.
To circumvent the limits of nativism (Dakar ’66) and Afro-radicalism (Algiers ’69), Festac ’77 imagined black solidarity as inclusive. So, people and communities (black diaspora) as well as postcolonial states (African) would be represented. It presents and celebrates the art of statelessness and state-art, while putting all forms of political representation under pressure.
For example, members of the Africobra arts collective (Chicago) are part of the United States delegation — except the US isn’t invited, only black Americans. They’re not there as members of Africobra either, because artists are invited as individual members of a recognised political community. They end up representing a country that does not exist — Black America. The only state symbol at their disposal is a flag — Marcus Garvey’s flag of panafricanism, which is itself a challenge to the idea of the nation-state. On the other hand, Miriam Makeba was a citizen of nine countries (excluding South Africa) and represented them all. The poet Mário Pinto de Andrade, one of the founders of Angola’s MPLA, appeared at Festac as Guinea-bissau’s minister of culture.
The work of producing pan-africanism as a political reality is ongoing. The questions — What is black? Who is Africa? — are very much alive in the cultural realm. One of the questions this book asks is, can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?
The paradox of Festac
The Centre for Black and African Art and Civilisation in Lagos is an important resource to understand Nigeria’s investment in Festac — three military governments carried the project. But no archive can contain the enormity of this event.
We had to use our network to gather material. We’re fortunate to have brilliant researchers, like Stacy Hardy, Graeme Arendse, Duduetsang Lamola and Ben Verghese. We used side projects to advance the research — for instance we published an issue of the Chronic in 2015 that examines divisions between North and sub-saharan Africa, a central issue at Festac.
This is the paradox of Festac. Some of our most important writers, artists, thinkers participated — 17 000 at official count. Many speak of it as a paradigm shift. Yet it seldom appears as a full story. Audre Lorde and Jayne Cortez published poems, Wole Soyinka wrote an essay, Festac Agonistes, and Festac appeared in a few memoirs. The only book-length project I’d seen was by the anthropologist Andrew Apter in 2005. And so its stories circulated in the manner of a family secret — a family of millions of people.
On the other hand, there are at least 40 albums about Festac. So our primary archive had to be the recordings produced by the likes of Orchestre Poly-rythmo de Cotonou (Benin), Gilberto Gil (Brazil), Tabu Ley Rochereau (Democratic Republic of the Congo), King Sunny Adé (Nigeria) and many more.
Working through sound, the mixtape was a natural format for aggregating ideas.
We wanted to tell stories of Festac through those who participated. But it is impossible to determine who was at Festac from official records. For example, a group of artists and activists led by Mdali founder Molefe Pheto travelled to Nigeria uninvited and without visas. Their names do not appear in official documents. Fortunately, Pheto likes to tell this story and it reached my ears via the curator Khwezi Gule.
Gathering these stories had to be collective and public work. We would organise events and invite people who were rumoured to have been at Festac to help to identify companions in the images we collected.
I was struck by the self-archiving practices of the radical people who attended Festac. Many produced piles of newspaper clippings, yellowed photographs, even K7 recordings. A rare special issue of Sechaba was found in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s personal library; an unheard live recording of Sun Ra was in a shoebox full of K7 tapes in New York. Lefifi Tladi kept his correspondence with Malangatana Ngwenya.
Initially we imagined the book as a collection of essays to be edited by the writer Akin Adesokan and myself. We produced a few drafts but none felt right. There was no music, and the people were left out.
Another project had begun to take form in our minds since the work on mixtapes — a publication that could be heard as well as read. A book that would represent the array of verbal and visual texts we’d received.
Encountering Toni Morisson’s Black Book in 2017 was a revelation. She had produced it 43 years earlier to tell the story of African-americans over three centuries.
The aftershocks of Festac
The festival took place in the middle of the war some historians describe as “cold”, but which was very hot these parts. The Chimurenga was intensifying in Zimbabwe and civil war was ongoing across the white redoubt in Southern Africa. The inauguration of Jimmy Carter as US president took place a week into Festac, and he immediately dispatched Andrew Young to Lagos, who did his best to avoid Agostinho Neto, the leader of socialist Angola.
But major political moves also took place on the performance stage. For instance, Mbeki united South African artists and ANC activists behind a single project led by musician Jonas Gwangwa — a dramatisation of the June 16 events. This arguably led to the formation of the Amandla Cultural Ensemble, a roving organ for mobilising international support for the struggle; the formation of Medu Art Ensemble; the Culture and Resistance Conference in 1982; and the establishment of the ANC’S department of arts culture.
By declaring itself a “black” country in its constitution of 1804, Haiti changed the rules. The emergence of continentalism in the 1950s, which culminated with the founding of the OAU, allowed many African leaders to sidestep this issue. But it came back to the fore at Festac — Senegal threatened to boycott the festival if North African countries were invited. Thus the festival had to be renamed, from the “World Festival of Black Arts”, to the “World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture”.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was detained in Kenya during Festac, even though his and Micere Mugo’s play, Matigari, was presented at the festival by the very government that imprisoned him. Togolese writer Yves Dogbé was jailed for a speech he planned to give at Festac. The Ugandan playwright Byron Kawadwa was killed by Idi Amin’s goons for his piece at Festac.
Fela Kuti organised a “counterfestac” at his club where everyone was invited to berate the Nigerian military government and their own. Obasanjo’s government destroyed his home and killed his mother.
By using the Benin ivory mask of Queen Idia as the festival emblem, and making an official request for its return from the British Museum, Festac helped politicise the question of restitution of African artefacts held in Western institutions.
The effect of Festac is felt most powerfully in the artistic collaborations it generated — really too many to list here. Please listen in the book.