A festival of African culture, music and dance called FESTAC ‘77 took place in the late seventies in Nigeria. But as we travel further away in time, its reputation as a politically pivotal moment grows louder.[1] The event was curated by Head of State, General Obasanjo and his military government.[2] Serena Yip observes that, "EXHIBITIONS mediate between people and art while FESTIVALS mediate between people through art."[3] What transpired at FESTAC ’77 with its sixteen thousand delegates from across Africa flipped the table on who decides who is an African and what constitutes African art and culture.[4] In this new moment, those questions were not being decided by colonial powers. [5] Instead, they took on a life of their own and even today are yet to be settled. How is it possible for something as pop-up as FESTAC ‘77 to challenge systems of knowledge that seemed already to be decided. (click here if the film won’t run) People who would not normally meet, meet at FESTAC ’77. When they meet, not only do they eat, sing, dance, drink and talk together, but they make strategic alliances. One way to frame this is as articulation. In this context articulation is about diverse people and struggles making provisional alliances to form political subjects. Articulation carries a double cargo. In one sense, to articulate is to communicate what is being thought. FESTAC ’77 dramatises the Pan-African ideal of a united Africa that includes its global diaspora. Peter Tosh’s song Africa, recorded within the few months between the Soweto Uprising and FESTAC ’77 states, “Don’t care where you come from, if you’re a black man, you’re an African”.[6] This restates Marcus Garvey’s earlier ideal, “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad”.[7] Suddenly at FESTAC ’77, Garvey’s Pan-African dream becomes visible, as when Marilyn Nance observes, “we all just stared at each other”[8] The other way to think of articulation is equally interesting. An articulated lorry consists of two parts, the truck and the trailer. They can link together or not.[9] FESTAC ‘77 hitches multiple groups and individuals together, not just at the opening ceremony but at FESTAC Village and during colloquia. But FESTAC ‘77’s collective expression of liberation is only a fleeting glimpse. In 1977, liberation in the world outside FESTAC ‘77 is still unwon. Zimbabwe is still Rhodesia, South Africa is still apartheid, Namibia is still under occupation, while Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Somalia blaze in hot wars fuelled by Cold War powers. After the last day in Lagos, everyone goes back to their wars.[10] For some, the fleeting glimpse makes a difference. FESTAC ’77 brings people together to experience an intense burst of Pan-African reality. It operates like a pop-up and creates the conditions for individual artists, writers, leaders and fighters to reposition themselves politically and set in motion new potential networks. Professor Hall argues that Rastafarians reinterpreted the Bible and in doing so, “they remade themselves; they positioned themselves differently as new political subjects”.[11] How is such an expensive project possible? Nigeria emerges from its devastating internal war in 1970, a conflict intensified and prolonged by external interests. In 1976, following the assassination of Murtala Mohammed, Obasanjo comes to power in the middle of an unprecedented oil boom.[12] Events across the world feed into what might be understood as a global post-colonial conjuncture. On March 30, 1976, Israeli forces kill unarmed Palestinian civilians protesting land seizures on Land Day. In June, apartheid police shoot dead 150 school children protesting at their inferior education. Over the following weeks, they kill hundreds more. In July, Punk music explodes into UK culture. And six weeks after Soweto, Black youth confront police in Ladbroke Grove during London Carnival, leading to violent clashes.[13] Garvey authors a horizon. Olusegun Obasanjo sets the stage to unite the Pan-African world. An audience of sixteen thousand delegates shows up, and Garvey’s dream is momentarily articulated. The Black world recognises itself and remakes itself as a political subject. How do the many articulations at FESTAC ’77 begin to blur the distinction between audience and event?. FESTAC Village, the National Theatre and infrastructure for the festival were rapidly assembled across coups and regime changes.[14] Obasanjo and his team curate an event to unite the Black world. In his foreword to the official FESTAC ’77 Souvenir brochure, Obasanjo frames his aims and orientation for the festival: Nothing is more appropriate at this time in Black and African history than a re-discovery of those cultural and spiritual ties which bind together all Black and African peoples the world over. It is the full realization of this fact that has motivated the Federal Military Government to take up the responsibility for organizing and staging the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and culture. The occasion will surely lead to the abandonment of the "museum approach" to our culture by which men of other cultures consider our culture only in terms of pre-historic objects to be occasionally dusted, displayed and studied instead as a living thing containing and portraying the ethos of our peoples.[15] Repositioning and politicising art and culture is central to Nigeria’s intent.[16] Adjusting the title from the ‘Negro Arts’ of the First festival to ‘Black and African Arts’ for the Second is a curating decision. It brings into the frame Africa’s diaspora in Europe and the Americas, liberation movements from states still under colonial domination, as well as the Arab African nations north of the Sahara. This reframing is part of what shifts the emphasis from Aime Césaire’s racially bounded Negritude to a more political Fanonian anti-colonial field. Initially, Senghor’s Senegal, which hosted the first, threatened to boycott the second festival if the Arab nations of North Africa were invited. Eventually they were, and the name change was part of the compromise.[17] Something else happens. There is a blur between artist delegates and freedom fighter delegates. Trying to research an authoritative invitation list has been fruitless. Take a look at the categories of participation from the official brochure:[18] • Nation-states • Liberation movements • Diaspora communities And then the list of Festival Events from the same document:[19] (a) Exhibitions (b) Dances (c) Music (d) Drama (e) Films (f) Literature (g) The Colloquium People are curated more than individual works of art or even selections of artists. Non-equivalent categories are placed side by side. In spatial design, the National Stadium, National Theatre and FESTAC Village combine to generate more encounter than spectacle. In conventional curating, this risks mismatch and overspill. But this structure is less likely to museumise African arts and culture; it is more likely to express the “living thing” Obasanjo has in mind. So, the stage is set. Where Marilyn Nance gazes at exotic Africans who gaze back at exotic African Americans, audience and performers are interchangeable. When Fela withdraws from FESTAC ’77 and sets up an alternative festival at his African Shrine venue in Ikeja, twenty or thirty minutes away, many of the main performers repeatedly moonlight or daylight to go there to perform or watch performances.[20] When rival liberation movements discover each other are at FESTAC ’77, they find themselves talking.[21] Ad hoc performances happen. For example, an ANC/BCM/SSRC/Amandla dramatization of the Soweto Uprising takes place at the National Theatre.[22] Thabo Mbeki and Oliver Tambo to think seriously about and make concrete plans for an inclusive cultural wing of the struggle.[23] This movement was eventually named Medu Arts Ensemble.[24] Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Obasanjo and his military government are negotiating financial and logistical support for liberation movements across Africa. [25]Ntone Edjabe and Thabo Mbeki even recount that Nigeria’s Head of State, General Obasanjo flies nineteen-year-old student, Tsietsi Mashinini, and his comrade, Khotso Seathlolo from Gaborone to Lagos.[26] They stayed at the presidential guest house.[27] Obasanjo then meets them to discuss how he could support their Soweto Students’ Representative Council.[28] Events spill off the stages to FESTAC Village and then Lagos for a long month. Time is compressed, people are far from home and the chances of meeting again at random are low. Connections are made on the fly. In temporary communities people make provisional alliances. FESTAC ’77 and impromptu mass protests like Occupy have that in common. In his ethnography of Occupy camps, Jeffrey S. Juris observes, “occupations were also emotionally vibrant sites of human interaction that modelled alternative communities and generated intense feelings of solidarity.”[29] New political formations are a possibility at pop-ups. FESTAC ‘77’s alternative communities of Africans from all sides of the continent alongside diasporans are one dimension. Artists, musicians, intellectuals and freedom fighters are another. All these groups sitting together at FESTAC Village, Fela’s shrine or the Colloquia create a startlingly rich milieu. Curating and the curatorial, as Martinon argues, use different logic.[30] Obasanjo and his team set out to stage a total event, orchestrating a convergence of arts, culture, politics and people under a single design. Their vision is pure display: to express African art and culture as something that’s alive and ungovernable. But what transpires is that the articulations at FESTAC ’77 spring to life. Culture is produced in encounter rather than displayed and opens the door to political formation. Here the distinction between audience and event begins to blur. The stage is no longer the centre, everything else is.[31] [1] Ntone Edjabe, “Reproducing FESTAC ‘77: A Secret Among a Family of Millions.” Chimurenga Chronic, 29 May 2020,. [2] Martin Banham et al., African Theatre 11: Festivals, (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2012). [3] Colin Charles et al., Festivals, Parties and Solidarity, 2026, Video, 10 minutes. [4] Edjabe “Reproducing FESTAC ’77.” [5] Festival Committee, FESTAC ’77 (Official Souvenir Programme) (London: Africa Journal Ltd; Lagos: International Festival Committee, 1977,. [6] Peter Tosh, “Africa,” On Equal Rights, Columbia Records, 1976, LP. [7] Marcus Garvey, “Africa for the Africans”, speech, Madison Square Garden, 2 August 1920. [8] Lucas, “The Photographer Who Documented a Long-Forgotten Pan-African Festival.” [9] David Morley, ed., “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others [1986],” in Essential Essays, vol. 1, by Stuart Hall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 236,. [10] Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa 1959-1976, Envisioning Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 310–47; Gebru Tareke, The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 247–85; Sam Nujoma, Where Others Wavered: The Autobiography of Sam Nujoma, Panaf Great Lives (London: Panaf, 2001); Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography (New York: Little Brown & Company, 2013); Gerald Horne, From the Barrel of a Gun: The United States and the War against Zimbabwe, 1965-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). [11] Morley, “On Postmodernism and Articulation”, 239. [12] Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158–66. [13] Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, The Soweto Uprisings: Counter-Memories of June 1976 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1998), 11; R. E. R. Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 108–10,; Shadi Khalilieh et al., eds., Land Day: the History, Struggle and Monument, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mossawa Center, 2015),; Chimurenga, FESTAC ´77. [14] Chimurenga, FESTAC ´77. [15] Festival Committee, FESTAC ‘77 (Official Souvenir Programme), 6. [16] Festival Committee, FESTAC ‘77 (Official Souvenir Programme), 6; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” prologue. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 235. “…responds by politicizing art.” [17] Edjabe, “Reproducing FESTAC ‘77: A Secret Among a Family of Millions.” [18] Festival Committee, FESTAC ‘77 (Official Souvenir Programme), 137. [19] Festival Committee, FESTAC ‘77 (Official Souvenir Programme), 140. [20] Chimurenga, FESTAC ´77. [21] Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki. [22] Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki, 578. [23] Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki. [24] Chimurenga, FESTAC ´77; Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki, 579. [25] Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki, 573. [26] Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki, 571; South African History Online, “Teboho ‘Tsietsi’ Mashinini”; Edjabe, “Reproducing FESTAC ’77: A Secret Among a Family of Millions.’ [27] South African History Online, ‘Teboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini.” [28] Edjabe, “Reproducing FESTAC ’77: A Secret Among a Family of Millions.” [29] Jeffrey S. Juris, “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation”, American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 259–79,. 268. [30] Jean-Paul Martinon, ed., The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). [31] Jean-Paul Martinon, ed., The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
