The First World Festival of Black Arts, or FESMAN as it’s commonly called, was a month-long pan-African festival that occurred from April 1 to 24 in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. A passion project of poet-President Leopold Senghor, the festival was supposed to mark Africa, “its rightful place as a creator of culture,” and “the opening of this new era.”

In a film made at FESMAN by William Greaves,[1] The First World Festival of the Negro Arts, the narrator recites and then riffs off the 1921 Langston Hughes[2] poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” In the background, dhows bob up to the ocean shore, life in various forms occupies space as shadows and silhouette, and Duke Ellington walks around a museum[1] [2] , scrutinising the Negro arts, and gold masks from Benin City.[3]

It’s April 1966. Duke has travelled to Dakar with his orchestra to perform at the inaugural cultural gathering of the black world. Also in attendance; Chiekh Anta Diop, Arthur Mitchell and Alvin Ailey, Josephine Baker, Soyinka, Amiri Baraka and other black luminaries. In few years, at pan-African festivals[4] deemed better organized and more radical, FESMAN will go on to receive harsh criticism for its dalliances in Cold War politics, or more specifically for its entanglement [3] [4] in the cultural Cold War, and the West-East battle for the African imaginary.

The writer has on her laptop in front her a folder filled with audio files labeled “African Writer’s Club,” “Lewis Nkosi,” “Encounters,” “Soyinka reads,” “Achebe,” “Nkosi”... The folder sits under another folder, labeled “The Transcription Centre.”

The Transcription Centre was an arts hub in the center [5] [6] of London that was mainly active in the 1960s. Funded by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the hub saw many artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora pass through its doors. While it was originally set up[5] to record interviews with these figures, the space became much more than that. From assisting Wole Soyinka as he put on his first production in London, to providing financial assistance to singer Sathima Bea Benjamin[6] and her husband Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand), the Transcription Centre become a foster home for the exiled exponents of Africa who were trying to map new cultural borders[7].

Navigating the Transcription Centre folder, the writer drags an audio file titled “FESMAN” into her music player. The first voice is easily discernible. It’s clear, authoritative, but with laced with the smooth, easy drawl one could associated with a late-night jazz show presenter. Lewis Nkosi,[8] exiled South African writer, is also in Dakar in 1966 documenting FESMAN.[9] As an interlocutor[7] [8] , he tries to mask his own politics, but in the “aahs” and “buts” and “uhms” is the loneliness of being so close to home, yet so far.

Another voice, that of a woman, Francophone: “Everyone can see the spectacle because the prices are not so high. There’s many spectacles everywhere in town and even the poorest people can see the spectacle.”

A man, a different voice but an easily recognisable francophone drawl[9] [10] , no peaks or highs in his voice, very little excitement: “The division, the economic division, between the Africans and the Europeans in Dakar is terrible. There is a … there is such a big gap between the Africans and the Europeans that the Africans may feel the pinch to pay for most of these things.”

The woman again – the editor using impeccable comic timing to splice these ideas together: “…and the festival is an idea of Senghor, you know. The president de la republique. So I think the festival is good.”

In February of 1967, Ellington and the rest of the US delegation to FESMAN will discover that the trip, even the plane chartered to ferry them to Dakar, was made possible with CIA funds. Over six weeks, a west coast publication, Ramparts, in tandem with The New York Times, publishes six articles showing how the CIA had covertly funded key cultural organizations. Through AMSAC[10], the African American Society of African Culture and the CCF, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the CIA infiltrated a number of black cultural organizsations.

“Always a rich source of inspiration to the rest of the world, politically independent Africa must now take its rightful place as a creator of culture. And the festival will mark the opening of this new era. Negro artists from nations the world over, will join their African brothers to present, for the first time as a cultural entity, the powerful and vivid contribution of the Negro to our life and times.” – President Leopold Senghor[11] at the opening of FESMAN.[11] [12] [13]

Not to be outdone, the USSR also showed its force at FESMAN. If the CIA would charter a plane, the Soviets would anchor a 750-passenger steamer at the Dakar Harbor. The Rossia hosted numerous VIP events, with free food and drinks, but the ships main attraction was an exhibition on the Atlantic slave trade, in essence declaring to Africa and its offspring, “You guys do remember who put you in the hold, in the hull, in chains and jails.”

Also onboard the Rossia was another film crew, this one dispatched by the Central State Studio of the Order of the Red Flag and led by Soviet filmmaker Leonid Makhnach. With footage shot over three weeks, they too would produce a film, called Rhythms of Africa, positioning themselves as allies to newly dependent and still colonized African states. The US, in turn, had commissioned Greaves to produce his documentary.

There’s a woman in the audio clip, we’ve heard her voice before. Nkosi refers to her using the title madame. It is unclear in his tone if this is sarcasm or genuine respect. Madame Rouch,[12] a renowned ethnographer and “writer about Africa,” when queried on the festival and its organization, responds, “they are just themselves … and they’ve always been for the different independences (sic) I’ve attended, I guess seventeen or eighteen of them. It’s a charming way of arranging things. Some call it the African way.” She laughs here. Is it nervously? I imagine her scanning the face of Nkosi before continuing. “You know what I mean?”

Nkosi: I don’t know what you mean.[13]

Jane Rouch: Yes, it’s a certain rhythm of life. A certain way of doing things. It’s what one may call … the anti-computer style, you know what I mean? And some people here have called this festival not the Festival of Negro Arts, but the Negro Art of a Festival.

“Yet colonial schools carry decolonial riders. Like all colonial technologies, ‘this system did not always produce the intended result.’ Colonial schools are especially geared to contradictory desires: the production of ‘self-reliant’ Blacks and the pacification of their political dissidence in the case of Alliance[14]. Booker T. Washington’s[15] idea of self-reliance was in no small part used to quell Black, Native, or in the case of Kenya,[16] Black Native unrest by developing a middle class of public servants to collaborate with the colonialist government. Yet Washington’s self-reliance also informed radical imaginations, such as Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism and Black, economic sovereignty.” la paperson, A Third University Is Possible

When Nkosi interviews Sudanese painter Ibrahim el-Salahi and East African artist and thinker Elimo Njau,[17] the tensions created by the relatively new concepts of Negritude are apparent.

Negritude, a framework of literary theory and critique, disavows colonialism and propogates for a prioritised pan African identity amongst Africans in Africa and the Diaspora. The word, coined by Aimé Césaire was solidified when he, Seghor and Léon Gontran Damas proclaimed it the journal they founded, L’Etudiant noir.

Famous detractors of Negritude have argued that it reinforces colo-mentalities and applies a too narrow definition of pan-African. Soyinka argued that it belongs to a “colonial ideology because it gives a defensive character to any African ideas”.

el-Salahi: The first time I heard the word Negritude, it gave me a strange feeling. And I had to chew it for some time to see what taste it had. And I must admit that when I came here, I came with a little bit of prejudices. And I realised that what I’ve seen here, it hasn’t nothing to do … it has no implication with the racial thing in itself, as much it has to do with a cultural thing.

Njau: Negritude, as far as I’m concerned, is a tool. And it was very gratifying to hear Aimé Césaire, who is really the man who started, or one of the people who really started the movement, he himself said last night that Negritude[18] is a weapon to awaken consciousness of Black culture. We really haven’t come here to celebrate Negritude, but to crucify the Negro flesh so that the truth may be liberated… I don’t believe in this idea of transition, particularly when it implies an indefiniteness. The people who talk transition, transition, transition… I think sometimes may be a postponement of one’s real confrontation with life.

“The Soviets used to say that the United States had free speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines. Today no one can hear you over the noise of talk.” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

At the end of the audio file, Dennis Duerden, director of the Transcription Centre, provides a round-up of FESMAN. It is optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. But mostly, it is unnervingly paternalistic. He laments the lack of better planning but applauds the effort in the way that a father might congratulate his toddler for their colorful, indiscernible drawings.

“You must define and rebuild your own house for yourself, and then welcome the outside person to enjoy the fruits of it.” – Elimo Njau

“To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons.” - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study[19]

FESMAN poster, courtesy of Chimurenga Library

[1] Film-maker. African- American Documentary maker. Pioneer.

[2] Activist, novelist, playwright. American. Black. See Harlem Renaissance. See The Ways of White Folks. See Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz.

[3] See the Head of Queen Idia.

[4] FESPACO. FESTAC. Why don’t we theorize the work of Marilyn Nance?

[5] In order to combat the communist swell in the international intellectual community, it was decided by the National Security Council that an appropriate agency would need to be found to resist the red swell. “The most effective form of propoganda is when the subject moves in the direction you desire for resons which he believes to be his own”. It was decided that the best vehicle for this would be the newly-founded CIA.

[6] Winnie Mandela: Beloved Heroine. Lovelight. I wrote a review of a biography on Benjamin, as written Carol Ann Muller. When it was published in the Chimurenga Chronic, we deliberated calling the article “Should White Women Write About Jazz?” Another title idea: What happens if you’re discovered by Duke Ellington, and you introduce your struggling pianist husband to him, and then history goes on to erase you?

[7] Marcus Garvey’s Black Zodiac. Coltrane’s Sketches of 12. Nolan Oswald Denis. Chimurenga Chronic – New Cartographies Issue.

[8] See Drum Magazine. See Mandela’s Ego. See Writing in Exile. See The Word Without a Home.

[9] The Promises of Negritude and Senghor’s love affair with France.

[10] AMSAC, the American Society of African Culture, was an organisation of African-American writers, artists and cultural workers founded in 1956 to organise lectures, exhibitions, performances and conferences in the US and Africa.

[11] First president of independent Senegal. Most famous quote: “In Africa, when children have grown up, they leave their parents' hut, and build a hut of their own by its side. Believe me, we don't want to leave the French compound. We have grown up in it, and it is good to be alive in it. We simply want to build our own huts.”

[12] After some thought, the writer has concluded that Nkosi was indeed being sarcastic.

[13] This will never end. Anthropologists and ethnographers will always try to teach Africans about themselves. There’s probably an African Proverb about this.

[14] Kenya’s Alliance High School was modelled on “the nineteenth-century system for educating Native Americans and African Americans in the South”. G.A Grieves, the principle of Alliance spent 1924- 1925 visiting and studying colonial schools designed to educate Black people and as “an adjunct to military operations calculated to pacify the people”.

[15] Like Cornell West, like Malcolm X, history punishes black thinkers for growing up in public, for changing their minds, for being wrong, more that it ever will a white thinker.

[16] Look up Apartheid.

[17] You should probably hear this name more often than you do.

[18] We’re still asking what makes one African. Who qualifies as black. See Transracialism. See Brazil. See India.

[19] Teju Cole, in his novel Everyday is for the Thief (2007), could have explored the benefits of corruption and fugitivity.