FESTAC ‘ 77… Somi And Her Fabric of Courage

Her allure swept across the room like a new broom. Draped in a monochrome jumpsuit, her enigma stuck out like the knotted braids she wore. Silence engulfed the air in that humid room at the Old Printing Press in Broad Street, Lagos, where Somi Kakoma stood with her band, her courage and an archive begging for awareness.

The music at the opening day of The Fabric of Courage, Somi’s week- long exhibition of the remarkable archives of the World Black Festival of Arts and Culture ( FESTAC), which held for the second time it occurred, back in 1977, was a marvel to listen to. It marked the debut Lagos performance of the Grammynominated jazzist and her band on her tributary work on the late South African songbird Miriam Makeba, dubbed, Zenzile: Reimagination of Miriam Makeba.

The exhibition featured photographs from Marilyn Nance, the official photographer for the North American zone at FESTAC ‘ 77, as well as a feature of Tam Fiofori’s iconic crowd shots at the festival, and other salient records kept by the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization ( CBAAC). And, ultimately, it casted a spotlight on one of the biggest ever global cultural activities held in Africa.

Somi, who thrives as a scholar, activist, musician and multi- racial personality, has been a ‘ native’ of Lagos suburbs despite originally being from Uganda and Rwanda. Her 2014 opus, The Lagos Music Salon, was a quintessential toast to the erratic megacity that shaped that jazz album. And, her fascination with Miriam Makeba, the only female African musician to perform at FESTAC ‘ 77, led her to the building blocks of the exhibition.

At the Fabric of Courage, Somi and her band’s intriguing stagecraft lit up hearts as she channels her enigma in vibrant footwork, ululated bursts, and sharp tempo transitions that coloured her hour long performance. Her desire to champion Pan- Africanism across all generations of her listeners charged the exhibition, and notable stakeholders including veteran culture curator Jahman Anikulapo, theatre scholar, Professor Duro Oni; Marilyn Nance; and CBAAC Director- General, Aisha Augie; already passed the baton with a thought- provoking roundtable on the festival’s past and future.

In a special sit- down with Guardian Music, the42- year- oldchanteusepeelsbackherexperience researching FESTAC ‘ 77 and organising the exhibition; her thoughts on building cultural consciousness and working with nonJazzists; as well as her forthcoming projects and her effervescent lore for cultural storytelling.

What are you up to right now? ELL,

WI’m working on a new album. I’m also workingona, youknow, well, peoplehave been expressing interest in touring the exhibition and in other parts of Nigeria, which is cool, which wasn’t the plan necessarily, but I’m thrilled about the possibility but yeah, I’m working on my new album. I’ve got some other shows in America and Europe. And performances, I guess, just touring. I’m a writer. I’m a playwright. So, I’m working on two new plays as well.

Your own organisation, Salon Africana, produced the exhibition. Tell us about this your creative engine room

Salon Africana was a boutique cultural agency and record label before the pandemic. It was established in 2019. Initially, we were focused on bringing over African musicians, African artists on the continent or in Europe, who are kind of operating outside of pop, mainstream African music space, but we’re doing really beautiful work in jazz in alternative, alte as they refer to it in Lagos, just a different kind of music, right? They aren’t necessarily as visible to the Western music industries as, say, Afrobeats are. So, initially it was about holding space for those African jazz musicians, African art musicians, and african al te musicians. And bringing them to do these more intimate salons in New York and then have an opportunity to talk about the work and so that’s where it originally that’s what I was originally doing. But with the plan of expanding of course, music is always sort of the marquee discipline, because I’m a musician, but understands holding space for the literary arts and various performing arts, dance and theater. So, initially, and we started doing these events, and we were in partnership with the Africa Centre here in New York. And then the pandemic happened, and obviously, live performances changed. And we decided to lean into the record label side of it. Through which I released my last two albums. And now that we’ve had a chance to kind of regroup and want to re- engage in terms of curating live experiences that really still hold space. We decided to start doing things that work on the continent. I’ m personally very interested in the archive you know, how we think about, how we care for or don’t care for, or engage with the archive of our cultural heritage on the continent and how that might inspire contemporary culture today. I had been doing some research on FESTAC, which really came out of what I’m doing on Miriam Makeba, because it was by looking at her history around the continent that I realised she was the only woman named at first and I was like, Well, why is that there were other women and then it kind of grew from there. So this was the first activation and we’re thrilled and the goal is to continue to do work or create experiences in historic sites of cultural production across the continent. So this was the first being real printing press and obviously, responding to the archive of FESTAC as a Pan African space.

How did you manage to meet up with Marilyn Nance and conceive the idea for the exhibition in Lagos?

So, 2022 was when her book, Last Day In Lagos,

came out. I first read about the book in the New York Times, there was an article about Marilyn Nan’sandof course, her editor rem iona ban jo, I was curious and said I’d always known about FESTAC and would hear older people speaking about how amazing it was, and I would always be like, why isn’t there more? Like what are the stories, why is it that we don’t really celebrate, I was just curious and fascinated by FESTAC and I ordered the book based on that article I read. About a week after I received it, I got an email from an organisation called Center for Art Research and Alliances also known as CARA, in New York, they are partly a gallery, partly a performance exhibition space. It’s also a bookstore and, and a publisher. It was just a very new space. It’s only been here since 2022. But it was sort of an interesting kind of interdisciplinary, multi- hyphenate cultural space and endeavor. And they reached out to me, because at the time they were hosting an exhibition by a South African artist, Naomi Younga, who had some part of his exhibition about Mariam Makeba. And because my play had been running in New York, many came to see the show. Many people who were passing through the exhibition were like, oh, you guys, should you guys should think about Sony coming here to do something because they were having, I guess, monthly performance sin response to his work. And so when they reached out to me, I was like, , I’d never heard of them. I started researching them. And then I saw in this book that they were also a publisher, which I thought was very interesting, that they were doing multiple things in that way. And so anyhow, I ended up collaborating with them doing the performance in their space. They had invited Marilyn Nance, because I mentioned that I was a fan of the book. They invited her and then that’s how she and I first came into community with each other. And so it was only a few months later that I actually started really researching FESTAC. It was probably seven months later actually, but I was in Nigeria that I came specifically to look at that history, which was December of 2022. And that’s when I started discovering this, the archive even in Nigeria. At the Center for Black and African Art and Civilization, also known as CBAAC in Lagos, many people weren’t even aware that CBAAC existed. I certainly wasn’t. And so then I discovered this whole archive they have there and I was like, let me lean into this because I just realized it was so vast. Anyhow, so the more I started thinking about the site you know, then you look at all the infrastructure that was made, FESTAC town or National theater or national stadium or even like a hotel and all these things were built because of FESTAC or it is to host all of the people who are coming from 50 to 15,000 black artists from around the world.