The Challenge of FESTAC ‘77, contribution for 2024 Lagos Biennial.
with The New Art School Modality and Moleskine Foundation.
This is indeed a moment when Black and African Peoples must intensify their efforts to posit their true identity in the contemporary world. This Festival represents an effort on our collective part to come together as a people so as to set in motion a new cultural awakening and cultural awareness in the Black and African world.
(Commander O.P. Fingesi, President of the International Festival Committee)
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The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77) was conceived and organized by the International Festival Committee. Its roots can be traced back to the inaugural event, the World Festival of Negro Arts, held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. The 1977 festival represented a substantial expansion in scope and size, inclusively celebrating the diverse participation of Black and African people from around the globe.1
The principal objectives of FESTAC ’77 were:
i.) To ensure the revival, resurgence, propagation and promotion of Black and African culture and Black and African cultural values and civilization.
ii.) To present Black and African culture in its highest and widest conception;
iii.) To promote Black and African artists, performers and writers, and to facilitate their world acceptance and their access to world outlets;
iv.) To bring to light the diverse contribution of Black and African peoples to the universal current of thought and arts;
v.) To promote better international and interracial understanding among men.
When Sun Ra arrived at the airport departing for Lagos, he was stopped by Airport Security due to the American passport he’d forgotten at home. Unfortunate. The Festival could not wait for anyone, would not wait, not even for (arguably) the most righteous, individually significant, figure to modern jazz, contemporary world-building, and the future of the zany: Le Sony’r Ra and his marvelous band, better known as Sun Ra and the magic Arkestra.
“Where is your passport, Mr. Ra?”
“I left it at home, but I brought this.”
Ra wiggled a document from his front pocket: SUN RA’s FESTAC ‘77 PASSPORT.
Global Entry to Black Cultural Citizenship. For that month, he was a member of FESTAC nation.2 Everyone got one. The idea of being home, back together again, outweighed any governmental, official concerns. Put them to rest for the celebration, for a monumental convening of Blackness, for a family reunion!
Historians Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne define Black Internationalism as a conceptual framework, an ethical practice, an alternative epistemology, and a radical politics constituted on six elements. Black Internationalism is anti-white supremacy/pro-continental unity; anti-colonialism/pro-self-determination; anti-imperialism/pro-revolutionary transformation; anti-capitalism/pro-socialism; anti-sexism/pro-radical Black humanism; and finally, anti-war/pro-durable peace.3 Black Internationalism, in other words, differs from Pan-Africanism in that it is ‘a conceptual framework’ specifying ‘a form of Pan-African activism, organizing, strategy, and scholarship inscribed in, engaged with, or adjacent to international Marxist-Leninist formations.’4 Black International, and Black Cultural Citizenship in this instance, are proposed socialist frameworks that both resist and transcend nationalistic, post-colonial, and prescriptive identities. In the end, FESTAC nation house 17,000 participants with over fifty nations represented.
The fifty of us students, from our quiet chairs at the museum or our little rectangles on Zoom, sat with artists and former FESTAC ‘77 participants—Darlene Blackburn, Haki Madhubuti, Dindga McCannon, K. Kofi Moyo, Roy Lewis, and Gerald Williams—as well as scholars—Andrew Apter, Abdul Akalimat, Romi Crawford, Ntone Edjabe, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’—to discuss exactly this notion: Black Internationalism as both a methodology and a concrete, outlasting community.
A second approach destabilizes the ontological distinction between real world and staged representation, according the ‘exhibitionary complex’s primary status in structuring political entities and projects. If from the first perspective, cultural citizenship within a Black world’s fair is a form of ‘virtual’ citizenship, which, like all festival forms, can only make reference to real forms of citizenship in real states and polities, from the second perspective, treating the festival as a sociopolitical entity sui generis, its correlative forms of citizenship, membership, and recognition, are real unto themselves. Black cultural citizenship within Afrocentric festivals is not a simulacrum of an external reality, but occupies a place within that reality.5
On the first day of class, producer and choreographer Ms. Darlene Blackburn led us in an African dance she learned at FESTAC ’77 forty-one years ago. Ms. Blackburn demonstrated first-hand the connection she experienced on a trip to Ghana in 1971. To her, there was an obvious link between traditional African dances and contemporary American ‘social dances.’ Returning home, she and the Darlene Blackburn Dance Troupe began to prepare performances for FESTAC ’77; in these, the troupe did not try to emulate African dance; instead, they chose to exhibit contemporary social dances in order to demonstrate how Black American dance was already African in the sense that the movements resembled eachother, specifically rooted in the same ancestry.6 Jiving in the front of the room at eighty-one years old, Ms. Blackburn tells us, ‘I am thankful to my ancestors that I am able to do the movements.’
To recruit American participants for FESTAC ’77, Festival Officials did not permit the American government to appoint participants or send anyone on the Nation’s official behalf. Instead, Festival Officials left invitations to the discretion of Black Community Leaders in American cities who were actively organizing in the Arts. When the American Delegation, including Ms. Blackburn, debuted at FESTAC’s opening ceremony, they marched with the Black Power flag instead of the flag of the United States.
PUBLISHED IN EBONY MAGAZINE, PHOTO EDITORIAL - MAY 1977
‘29 Days that Shook the Black World’
THE CHALLENGE OF FESTAC
It is too early to assess the final meaning of FESTAC. But two points are clear. First of all, and most important of all, FESTAC, made unmistakably clear that blacks, wherever they live, whatever flag they salute, whatever language they speak, have at least two things in common, a culture and a hope. Beyond all that, FESTAC put the world on notice that there is a new force in the world which must be reckonedwith in future calculations about the world. The meaning and implications of this were underlined in an eloquent editorial in the Nigerian Daily Time, which said that “a powerful idea has been reasserted [by FESTAC]”—the idea that “there is a black nation, a black world. It is a world
whose citizens are spread all around the
globe,a world whose people share not only
a tradition of customs, but also of ethical
values. And it is these values that demand
that we exert ourselves, not only in the realm
of art, but also in the realm of politics.
The black world must continue to see its
civiiization and its freedom as threated
seeing as a single black man or woman
remans oppressed anywhere in the world.
This is the inescapable challenge which this
gathering has placed before us.
In adittion to small gestures like a forgotten passport, our classrom asks how Black artists of this century, across conflict and borders, might perform anti-structure to the macro-scale of FESTAC ‘77 again.
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1. ‘It was the biggest and most significant gathering of black people in the history of the world, and it was 500 years in the making. It started, this ingathering of blackness, five centuries ago with the arrival of the first slave ship off the West Coast of Africa.’ “29 Days That Shook the Black Word.” Ebony Magazine, May 1977.
2. Such passports consolidated identities such as African American or ‘Black British’ into homogeneous belonging. Participation was open to all member states of the AU (formerly OAU), all Liberation Movements recognized by the AU, and most significantly, all Black communities outside the African continent. David Morris and Ntone Edjabe, “Performing Pan-Africanism – Ntone Edjabe in Conversation with David Morris,” web log, Afterall (University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins., April 20, 2019).
3. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Gerald Horne. “Pan-Africanism to Black Internationalism .” Essay. In Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, ed. by Reiland Rabaka (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020), 67-70.
4. Burden-Stelly and Horne, Routledge Handbook of Pan-Africanism, 68-69.
5. Andrew Apter, “Beyond Négritude: Black Cultural Citizenship and the Arab Question in FESTAC 77,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2015): 313–26, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2015.1113126.
6. Darlene Blackburn: Representing US Dance at FESTAC, Chicago Dance History Project (2021).
(l) Sun Ra photographed by Bob Crawford at FESTAC ‘77.
(r) Roy Lewis addressing The New Art School Modality on Novermber 7, 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
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