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In Blog

Reclaiming cultural identity: the potential transformative role of postcolonial festivals in Lesotho

rethabile malibo

Imagine a country so high in the clouds that its lowest point is higher than the peaks of most other nations. Lesotho, a small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa, may be limited in area, but what it lacks in square kilometres, it compensates in altitude, beauty and cultural resilience. With rugged mountains covering three-quarters of its terrain, it has earned the nickname Kingdom in the Sky. However, behind this picturesque scenery lies a history of cultural disruption shaped by colonialism, missionary intervention and post-independence modernisation. This article examines contemporary cultural festivals — specifically the Morija Arts and Cultural Festival (MACuFe) and the Maletsunyane Braai Festival (MBF) — as platforms for cultural reclamation, creative economies and the reconstruction of national identity in postcolonial Lesotho. Using postcolonial theory[1] and cultural economy frameworks[2], I argue that festivals in Lesotho serve as sites of cultural resistance, economic opportunity and ideological contestation. Comparing MACuFe and MBF, I explore how heritage preservation and contemporary culture are connected in a cultural system that is under-resourced.

Postcolonial festivals in Africa

Postcolonial festivals in Africa have evolved alongside shifts in how African history, culture and power are interpreted. Early colonial and mid-20th-century scholarship, influenced by anthropology, treated African festivals as static remnants of tradition, detached from political struggle and historical change.[3] This perspective began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, as postcolonial festivals were recognised as sites of cultural resistance and political reawakening. A key reference is FESTAC held in 1977, a symbolic event aimed at restoring African historical consciousness after colonial erasure.[4] It brought together artists, intellectuals and performers from across Africa and the diaspora. Other festivals included FESMAN (Dakar), FESTAC (Lagos) and PANAFEST. These festivals emerged as cultural platforms that celebrated African identity, artistic production and historical consciousness in the aftermath of colonial rule. The performances provided spaces for emotional, spiritual and historical connection between Africa and its diaspora, enabling participants to engage with shared histories of displacement memory and cultural identity (Schramm, 2000; Holsey, 2008).[5] At a continental level, the African Union’s (AU), Charter for African Cultural Renaissance and other initiatives encourage member states to protect cultural heritage, promote African identity and strengthen creative industries as pillars of sustainable development while also supporting cultural exchange across the continent. In this broader context, post-colonial festivals function not only as cultural or artistic events but also as platforms for cultural diplomacy, tourism and economic development. Beginning in the 2000s, scholarship on postcolonial festivals began to focus more closely on their economic aspects, influenced by the rise of creative economies and cultural policy studies.[6] For example, the Eswatini Bushfire Festival shows how contemporary African festivals now operate at the intersection of art, tourism, corporate sponsorship and social activism.[7] However, while festivals generate income, visibility and employment, they also risk becoming highly commercialised. African postcolonial festivals are thus complex spaces where cultural memory, political meaning and economic ambition coexist.[8] MACuFe and the MBF reflect this hybridity. MACuFe resonates with FESTAC and PANAFEST, while the MBF aligns with the entrepreneurial creative-economy model exemplified by Bushfire.

The Basotho context

The arrival of missionaries in Lesotho in 1833 marked a cultural shift. While the missionaries introduced formal education and Christianity, they also facilitated the systematic displacement of the Basotho’s indigenous knowledge systems, such as initiation schools and performative traditions, which were banned and labelled heathen. Even after Lesotho gained independence in 1966, the impacts of colonialism persisted. As Fanon observed, postcolonial societies often inherit psychological fragmentation alongside political sovereignty.[9] In Lesotho, this manifested as a decline in the transmission of indigenous cultural knowledge and ambivalent attitudes towards cultural and traditional expressions such as costume and music. MACuFe was established in 1998 by the Morija Museum and Archives following political instability marked by looting and violence in Lesotho. MACuFe's objective was to unite Basotho across political and religious divisions. The festival takes place in Morija, affectionately known as Selibeng sa Thuto (the Well of Knowledge). Morija holds immense cultural significance; it is home to Lesotho's first printing press, teacher training college and church.[10] MACuFe is held annually between late September and early October for five days, featuring performing arts, cultural exhibitions, competitions and capacity-building workshops. The festival's overriding theme, Kaofele re chabana sa Khomo (unity in diversity), amplifies a pluralistic understanding of Basotho identity at a time when globalisation intensifies cultural homogenisation. Beyond cultural preservation, the festival also contributed to the development of the arts by providing a structured performance circuit in the absence of a national theatre or arts council. MACuFe served as the primary national platform for local artists' visibility. However, despite its cultural legitimacy and nation-building role, MACuFe remained structurally vulnerable due to inconsistent funding, inadequate infrastructure and limited long-term government commitment. These challenges contributed to its decline and led to a ten-year hiatus.

Fig. 1: Boys performing Ndlamo (Image: Morija Museum and Archives)

By contrast, MBF, established in 2016 by Basotho, represents a new generation of postcolonial festivals motivated by entrepreneurship, tourism and the creative industries. The MBF is held annually in Semonkong at Maletsunyane Falls — the highest single-drop waterfall in Southern Africa. The falls plunge 192 metres into a gorge, making it one of the most beautiful spots in Africa. MBF takes full advantage of this natural wonder, with events spanning three days on the last weekend of November. Activities include camping, braai competitions, music, fashion pop-ups, craft markets, local beer tastings, blanket presentations and family activities such as helicopter rides and horseback riding. Between 2023 and 2024, MBF experienced significant growth: attendance more than doubled, with international guests from Southern Africa, the USA and Brazil, and revenue surpassed $589,200.00 USD. This growth illustrates how contemporary festivals in Lesotho combine tourism, entertainment and cultural activities to attract local and international visitors. The figure below demonstrates the economic potential of festival tourism within Lesotho’s creative economies.

Fig. 2: Demographics of the Maletsunyane Braai Festival's visitors (Infographic: visitlesotho.org.ls/statistical-reports)

Unlike MACuFe’s heritage preservation mandate, MBF exemplifies the creative-economy model described by Throsby, in which culture is mobilised as both symbolic capital and an economic engine.[11] Both festivals are staking Lesotho’s claim in Africa's cultural renaissance and serve as potent tools for driving economic development.

Challenges and prospects of postcolonial festivals in Lesotho

Despite their ideological differences, MACuFe and MBF face a common set of structural challenges that reflect deeper policy, governance and infrastructural deficits in Lesotho’s cultural economy. These challenges are interconnected and affect the sustainability and ideological direction of festival culture.

Funding

Festival sustainability in Lesotho relies heavily on corporate sponsorship, particularly from telecommunications companies. While this support sustains operations, it prioritises market interests over heritage and community participation, marginalising the indigenous traditions the festivals are meant to preserve. For example, in MACuFe, a significant portion of the sponsor's budget was allocated to securing popular acts from South Africa, sidelining grassroots, community-driven elements and local artists. To maintain other cultural activities, MACuFe depended on ticket sales priced as low as $1 USD, which generated little revenue and starved these activities of resources. The market-driven approach diluted the festivals’ educational and heritage mandates. Conversely, MBF’s commercial success demonstrates how corporate-friendly programming can secure financial stability, yet it also raises concerns about the long-term cultural consequences of festival commodification. If not carefully balanced, cultural festivals risk shifting from cultural movements to marketing campaigns.

Festival ownership

A key question is who owns cultural festivals. MACuFe is privately owned, yet it represents national heritage. So, who truly owns these festivals: the community or the government? Unclear distinctions between government control, community custodianship and private management weaken accountability structures and compromise cultural sustainability. For instance, when the government moved Independence Day celebrations from Morija to Maseru, it reduced MACuFe attendance. The clash of events was not just a change in location but a split in identity, a silent conflict over heritage. Instead of uniting Basotho, the events divided them. This raises the question of the government’s role in protecting cultural spaces. True cultural revitalisation requires shared stewardship; without it, cultural festivals risk becoming turf wars rather than platforms for unity. MBF, while privately owned, receives public-sector support, raising questions about the governance of state support to private cultural enterprises: how much support is appropriate, how should it be provided, and who qualifies? Without formalised frameworks defining stakeholder responsibilities, festivals remain vulnerable to political shifts and private withdrawal.

Event clashing

The absence of a national festival calendar and coordination has led to destructive competition. The emergence of the Mangaung Cultural Festival (MACufe) in Bloemfontein, South Africa concurrent with MACuFe in Lesotho, with a larger budget and a more prominent lineup, drew audiences and performers away from Morija. Other festivals in Lesotho also emerged and were held around the same time as MACuFe. These dynamics affect underfunded festivals differently, disadvantaging them relative to larger ones. To survive, strategic local and regional partnerships are therefore essential for sustainability

Infrastructure

Although the Lesotho National Cultural Policy (2017) and the Extended National Strategic Development Plan II 2023/24-2027/28 recognise the economic potential of creative industries, institutional implementation remains weak. Currently, Lesotho lacks a national theatre, cinematographic infrastructure, professional recording studios and a national arts council. Creative arts associations, such as the Theatre Association of Lesotho (THALE) and the Motion Picture Association of Lesotho (MPALE), exist without offices or funding. In the absence of tax incentives for creative industries, private investment and commitment remain limited. Consequently, cultural labour continues to operate informally, and creative-arts graduates face persistent structural exclusion.

Archiving

Despite its cultural impact, MACuFe lacks a comprehensive institutional digital archive. The absence of documentation undermines cultural historiography, assessment and intergenerational transmission. As Assmann argues, cultural memory without archives is structurally vulnerable to erasure.[12] In Lesotho, this threatens ongoing cultural continuity. The experience is different for MBF, which benefits from informal digital documentation; however, these materials remain commercially oriented. The lack of a national digital-heritage strategy threatens long-term cultural continuity. Both festivals operate in persistent tension between cultural reverence and commercial exploitation. While commodification generates revenue, it risks transforming sacred traditions into mere entertainment. The challenge is to develop cultural-enterprise models that maintain cultural significance while remaining sustainable.[13]

Culture commodification

There is a fine line between celebrating, honouring and preserving traditions, and the commercialisation of culture, which involves generating income and attracting tourists. However, what happens when sacred traditions become hashtags? Should traditional practices be live-streamed? Should sacred songs be remixed? Should traditional art be diluted for brand appeal? These are questions that cultural festivals should consistently ask, and in contexts where traditions are already suppressed, it becomes a fight for survival. Lesotho's festivals have demonstrated that culture is not a luxury; it is infrastructure. However, limitations remain that must be addressed to realise the potential of these festivals. Lesotho must:

Build digital cultural archives by capturing, curating and preserving festival performances, oral histories and art.
Forge partnerships with the AU, the private sector and the diaspora to fund, promote and expand these festivals.
Invest in ethical enterprise by providing training, developing fair-trade artisan markets and supporting youth entrepreneurship. Let cultural pride become both an income stream and a museum exhibit.
Provide tax rebates for the private sector, especially for businesses that support the creative industries.

Culture is central to Africa's development. The Charter for African Cultural Renaissance and frameworks for creative economies offer guidelines for how festivals can promote Pan-African unity, increase youth employment and safeguard cultural heritage. MBF and MACuFe should align follow these guidelines to secure funding and gain visibility and support from the region. Imagine a Pan-African festival circuit where artists can tour across borders, cultural works are widely shared, and nations celebrate their identities together. Lesotho can join this collaboration to unlock funding.

Fig. 3: Maletsunye Falls (Image: public domain)

Conclusion

MACuFe and MBF represent two interconnected, yet ideologically distinct, trajectories of postcolonial festival culture in Lesotho. MACuFe emphasises collective memory, intergenerational pedagogy and heritage, while MBF foregrounds youth-driven creative economies, digital branding and tourism. Comparing these two festivals demostrates that cultural festivals in Lesotho can simulataneously preserve heritage and foster economic activity. However, without strong cultural leadership, reliable funding, proper archival preservation and national support for the creative industry, festival sustainability remains precarious. Unless these structural deficits are addressed, Lesotho risks losing not only the festivals but also the broader ecosystems of cultural knowledge production and economic empowerment they foster. Ultimately, reclaiming cultural identity through festivals extends beyond remembering the past. It involves negotiating how cultural heritage can be preserved, interpreted and economically sustained within contemporary creative economies as well as strategic negotiation over the nation's cultural future in a rapidly changing creative economy. Festivals thus emerge as both instruments of resistance against cultural erasure and laboratories for inclusive postcolonial development. [1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 'Decolonising the Mind', Diogenes 46, no. 184 (1998). [2] David Throsby, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Canbridge University Press, 2001); Christiaan De Beukelaer, 'The UNESCO/UNDP 2013 Creative Economy Report: Perks and Perils of an Evolving Agenda', Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 44, no. 2 (2014). [3] Terence Ranger, 'The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa', in Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa, ed. Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993). [4] David Murphy, Martin Munro and Tsitsi Jaji, 'The Performance of Pan-African Identities at Black and African Cultural Festivals', International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 7 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1476038; Cheikh Anta Diop and Harold Salemson, Precolonial Black Africa (Chicago: Review Press, 2012). [5] Katharina Schramm, African Homecoming: Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage (New York: Routledge, 2010); Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). [6] Throsby, Economics and Culture; Terry Flew, The Creative Industries: Culture and Policy (London: SAGE, 2012). [7] Paul Nkemngu Acha-Any and Neliswa Nomkhosi Dlamini, 'Festival Tourism as an Instrument of Sustainable Livelihood in Eswatini', GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites 26, no. 3 (2019) https://doi.org/10.30892/gtg.26314-402. [8] De Beukelaer, 'The UNESCO/UNDP 2013'. [9] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. [10] Daniel P. Kunene, 'Leselinyana la Lesotho and Sotho Historiography', History in Africa 4 (1977). [11] Throsby, Economics and Culture. [12] Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). [13] De Beukelaer, 'The UNESCO/UNDP 2013'; Joost Dessein et al., eds., Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development. Conclusions from the COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2015).

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Acha-Any, Paul Nkemngu and Neliswa Nomkhosi Dlamini. 'Festival Tourism as an Instrument of Sustainable Livelihood in Eswatini'. GeoJournal of Tourism and Geosites 26, no. 3 (2019): 849-60. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.30892/gtg.26314-402. Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511996306. De Beukelaer, Christiaan. 'The UNESCO/UNDP 2013 Creative Economy Report: Perks and Perils of an Evolving Agenda'. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 44, no. 2 (2014): 90-100. Dessein, Joost, Katriina Soini, Graham Fairclough and Lummina Horlings, eds. Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development. Conclusions from the COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2015. Diop, Cheikh Anta and Harold Salemson. Precolonial Black Africa. Chicago: Review Press, 2012. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963. Flew, Terry. The Creative Industries: Culture and Policy. London: SAGE, 2012. doi: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446288412. Holsey, Bayo. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Kunene, Daniel P. 'Leselinyana la Lesotho and Sotho Historiography'. History in Africa 4 (1977): 149-61. Murphy, David, Martin Munro and Tsitsi Jaji. 'The Performance of Pan-African Identities at Black and African Cultural Festivals'. International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 7 (2018): 947-51. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1476038. Ranger, Terence. 'The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa'. In Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa, edited by Terence Ranger and Olufemi Vaughan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. Schramm, Katharina. African Homecoming: Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2010. doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315435411. Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ wa. 'Decolonising the Mind'. Diogenes 46, no. 184 (1998). Throsby, David. Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Canbridge University Press, 2001. Continue Reading

1 September 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog

Festac ’77: navigating dis:connections in postcolonial pan-African festivals, legacy, and memory

gideon morison

The year is 1977. Lagos, a bustling postcolonial city and the then-capital of Nigeria, was preparing to host one of the biggest cultural events in the history of the Black world: the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC '77. The streets were colourfully decorated with festival flags and banners bearing the iconic mask of Ancient Benin’s Queen Idia, adopted as the festival’s logo (see fig. 1).[1]

Fig. 1: The festival emblem depicting a mask of Queen Idia (Image: International Festival Committee, CBAAC)

The city and a few other locations — especially Kaduna and Kano — became massive construction sites, hosting dual-purpose development and modernisation projects in General Yakubu Gowon’s post-civil-war infrastructural renaissance plan, the Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (3Rs) Programme. This led to the construction of new motorways to ease Lagos’s notorious traffic congestion, a racecourse in Kaduna, hotels and guest houses, and a festival village. However, a gleaming new National Theatre Complex, equipped with cutting-edge technologies in modern staging, emerged as the hub of the event.[2] The scale of the festival and its venues revealed far greater ambitions that went beyond restoring the nation's reputation in the wake of the kwashiorkor crisis in Southeastern Nigeria during the civil war. The goal was to showcase Nigeria’s international prestige and newfound oil wealth and to project a welcoming atmosphere to the over 17,000 Black and African descendants from about 55 countries attending the festival. Nigeria sought to present itself as the de facto leader of the Black world.[3] FESTAC ’77, FESMAN Dakar 1966, PANAF Algiers 1969 and the Zaire Music Festival Kinshasa 1974 were ‘postcolonial pan-African festivals’ – a series of cultural festivals organised and held across Africa after independence between 1966 and 1977, mostly planned and financed by states, to demonstrate Pan-African unity and envision a renascent Africa.[4] Here I explore the ideational and political transformations that shaped the agenda of FESTAC ‘77, highlighting the dis:connections in its organisational process and the tensions that underpinned these processes.

Dis:connective pathways to pan-African renaissance through festivals

The origins of postcolonial pan-African festivals are often traced to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959). These congresses generated ideas for organising festivals to demonstrate the objectives of a renascent Africa, and they established an organisational model for the inaugural staging in Dakar. Although postcolonial pan-African festivals emerged as a cultural project promoted by a broad coalition of groups loosely connected by the objective of promoting pan-African unity through socio-political, intellectual and cultural contacts between the continent and its diaspora, their organisation and visions of development were often contradictory and disconnected. The seeds of these disputes first became visible at the congresses. Though envisioned as a ‘Cultural Bandung’ for intellectual discourse on postcolonial pan-African culture and political development, the intense intellectual exchange at the congresses pitted the Négritude movement against most other Black/African intellectuals, notably Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Richard Wright.[5] While the Négritude camp, led by Léopold Senghor, championed a Black/African heritage that sought not only to reclaim the elements of Black identity and culture erased by colonialism, but also to recognise Africa’s cultural, social, economic and political contributions that could enrich a future ‘civilisation of the universal’, Fanon and other artist-scholars criticised Senghor’s worldview as politically insufficient, essentialising and elitist.[6] For these ‘radical’ artist-scholars, African heritage and culture had the potential to improve the economic and social experiences of the masses, rather than merely celebrating spiritual connections that served the social elites. Thus, the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, held in April 1966 to demonstrate Négritude as a path for Africa’s postcolonial development, provoked strong reactions in the African Renaissance movement. Beyond ideological disagreements over the theoretical limits of Négritude in postcolonial development, some considered the organisation of FESMAN to be exclusionary, which gave rise to the Pan-African Cultural Festival (PANAF) in Algiers as a counter-festival.[7] PANAF was one of the most revolutionary and representative pan-African events of the 20th century.[8] The organisers of the festival attracted participants from all member countries of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Black diaspora movements worldwide, national liberation movements in Africa, as well as representatives from the Middle East and Asia.[9] In contrast to FESMAN, PANAF focused on demonstrating the inextricable link between culture and the ideological struggle for the liberation of the continent from the forces of colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism.[10] At PANAF, Négritude was denounced as ‘neocolonial pacifism’ and instead a Pan-African Cultural Manifesto was published as a guiding principle for Africa's radical cultural practices and revolutionary postcolonial future.[11] The next major postcolonial pan-African festival was scheduled to be held in Lagos in 1970 as a continuation of the Dakar event, but due to the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–70) and organisational shortcomings, the event did not take place until 1977. In the meantime, Zaire ‘74 in Kinshasa emerged as a stopgap event between Lagos ‘75 and later FESTAC ‘77. Since Zaire ’74 was mainly focused on music and linked to Mobutu’s power and interpretation of the African cultural renaissance — Mobutuism — it has been largely ignored in the literature on postcolonial pan-African festivals.[12] The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Festac) Lagos 1977 was the largest and grandest postcolonial pan-African festival of the era. Following ideological rivalry within the pan-African renaissance movement, Festac '77 was organised as a compromise event to reconcile extreme ideological positions and paths towards Black/African renaissance. Its organisers drew inspiration from both the cultural heritage of the continent’s past civilisations and the contemporary radical spirit to propose a developmental pathway towards a technology-driven Black/African cultural modernity. According to Nigeria’s then-military-head-of-state, Olusegun Obasanjo, this pathway led through the adoption of modern technology, industrialisation and technological advancement.[13] However, Senegal’s campaign for the exclusion of the North African Zone (especially Algeria) from parts of the festival not only led to a diplomatic dispute between Senegal, Nigeria and Guinea on one side and the North African countries on the other, but also to organisational crises in the International Festival Committee (IFC). This crisis led to Senegal’s withdrawal from the festival and the quiet resignation of Senghor as one of the festival’s patrons, as well as the dismissal of Alioune Diop as secretary of the IFC.[14] Although Senegal was readmitted to the festival a year later in a ‘spirit of solidarity and unity’ after mediation from a panel of prominent artists led by Wole Soyinka, the negative media coverage the crisis triggered, along with other organisational crises such as the ‘squandermania’ affair, ‘dos Nascimento’ affair and the ‘Fela’ affair, dampened interest in the events and played a central role in tarnishing the legacy and memory of the event at the national level.[15]

Archiving Festac ‘77 and its contradictory memory

Following the example of FESMAN in 1966, Festac ’77 was hosted with a focus on preserving its memories through archiving.[16] Given that colonial archives were instrumental in propagating negative narratives and perceptions of the continent, it is not surprising that organisers of postcolonial pan-African festivals sought to preserve both the spirit and memories of these festivities by archiving and building institutions. Thus, Festac ’77 led to the establishment of various cultural institutions that served as the physical and institutional legacies of the event in Nigeria. Of these, the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC) stands out for its archiving mandate. CBAAC was founded as a pan-African institution based in Nigeria to function as a research centre to preserve the collective memory of the festival and promote African arts and civilisation in a globalised, yet fragmented cultural space (see fig. 2).

Fig. 2: the CBAAC Office in Broad Street, Lagos (Photo: Gideon Morison)

The archive holds all the materials used at the festival in trust for the 59 Black and African countries and communities that participated. This includes key materials, documents and minutes of the International Festival Committee (IFC) as well as artistic collections and artefacts. It also seeks, acquires and holds rare cultural objects of Black/African heritage through donation or repatriation from public and private institutions worldwide. Envisioned as a multidimensional agency with a strategic pan-African mandate to preserve, promote and propagate Black/African cultural and creative heritage, the centre’s collection currently comprises approximately 1300 audio-visual materials from Festac ’77, 13,579 books and publications, and over 1200 artworks and artefacts, distributed across four archival departments: museum, archives, audio-visual collection and the library (see fig. 3). Considering the ‘collective and collaborative’ nature of its collections, the pan-African vision of its mandate and the contested legacy of its commemorative event, CBAAC has attempted to navigate the disconnections of Festac ’77 by projecting a more positive and inclusive narrative of the event through programmes, events and initiatives. However, this narrative of the festival offers an overtly national perspective, placing disproportionate emphasis on Nigeria as the host nation at the expense of a pan-African vision, despite the broad range of contributions that made it a unique pan-African experience.[17] The implication is that, just as ‘host-nation omnipotence’ became an institutional practice, generating tensions and discontinuities in postcolonial pan-African festivals, it also accounts for dis:connective archiving and a certain operational dynamic in CBAAC. Central to this dis:connective dynamic is the fact that the archive operates in the administrative and operational structures of the Nigerian government in terms of funding and personnel, and it is almost completely disconnected from the operational agendas of Pan-African institutions like the African Union, apart from occasional contacts for event promotion and commemorative festivities. Apart from this, the memory of the festival in the country is contested. This contestation is shaped by a combination of negative press about the corruption and waste that characterised the event’s organisation, the derelict physical condition of its legacy projects – Festac Town and the National Theatre – due to ineffective maintenance, negative religious reinterpretation of the festival’s spiritual dimensions in Nigeria’s burgeoning Pentecostal Christian circles, and, until recently, the decline of historical studies in educational curricula. Taken together, these factors weave a unique web of dis:connective narratives around the legacy and memory of Festac ’77, both nationally and transnationally.

Fig. 3: the CBAAC archives (Photo: Gideon Morison)

Epilogue

I’ve examined dis:connections in the organisational and archival processes of postcolonial pan-African festivals, focussing particularly on the legacy and memory of Festac ’77 in Lagos, Nigeria. Festac ’77 embodied Nigeria’s global ambitions and visions of postcolonial development, driven largely by its newfound oil wealth in the 1970s. However, its organisational and archival processes were characterised by major operational deficiencies, conceptual discontinuities, political tensions and logistical limitations that made the event the last hallmark festival of the era until the 1990s. While the archiving of this event has sought to navigate these disconnections through collective and collaborative pan-African initiatives, its embeddedness in the administrative and operational structures of the Nigerian government has produced a dis:connective dynamic that seems to perpetuate a ‘host-nation omnipotence’ that generated tension in the organisation of postcolonial pan-African festivals. Given the global nature of Black/African heritage and cultures, and the transnational aims of their promotion and remembrance, Festac ’77 and the CBAAC collection allow a critical reappraisal of the collaborative and disruptive processes that enabled the conception and organisation of postcolonial pan-African festivals, highlighting the inherent complexity and duality of their organisational and archival framework. [1] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, (Lagos: Modern Publication Co. Ltd., n.d.). [2] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, 13. [3] Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). [4] Gideon Morison, 'From Renaissance to festivalisation: Festival networks and institutional legacies of selected pan-African cultural productions, 1977-2019' (PhD LMU, 2022). [5] Guirdex Masse, 'A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists' (PhD Emory University, 2016), 13-14. [6] Samuel Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead": Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969)', in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). [7] Anthony Ratcliff, 'When Négritude Was in Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966', The Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 7 (2014). [8] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"'. [9] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"'. [10] Ratcliff, 'When Négritude Was in Vogue', 87. [11] Anderson, '"Negritude is Dead"', 134. [12] For an in-depth exploration of Zaire ’74 as a postcolonial pan-African festival, see Dominique Malaquais, 'Rumble in the Jungle: boxe, festival et politique', Africultures 2, no. 73 (2008). [13] Dayo Duyide, 'Obasanjo Opens FESTAC ‘77: Africans have come of age', in Festac ’77 – A Daily Sketch Souvenir (Lagos: Sketch Publishing Company, 1977). [14] International Festival Committee, Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts, 9. [15] Morison, 'From Renaissance to festivalisation', 170-76. [16] David Murphy, 'The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Art', in The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, ed. David Murphy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). [17] Étienne Lock, 'Identité africaine et Catholicisme: problématique de la rencontre de deux notions à travers l'itinéraire d'Alioune Diop (1956-1995)' (Docteur Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2014).

Fig. 4: The Center for Performing Arts in Iganmu, Nigeria (Photo: dotun55)

Bibliography

Anderson, Samuel. '"Negritude is Dead": Performing the African Revolution at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers, 1969)'. In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, edited by David Murphy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Apter, Andrew. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Duyide, Dayo. 'Obasanjo Opens FESTAC ‘77: Africans have come of age'. In Festac ’77 – A Daily Sketch Souvenir, Lagos: Sketch Publishing Company, 1977. International Festival Committee. Festac '77 Report and Summary of Accounts. Lagos: Modern Publication Co. Ltd., n.d. Lock, Étienne. 'Identité africaine et Catholicisme: problématique de la rencontre de deux notions à travers l'itinéraire d'Alioune Diop (1956-1995)'. Docteur, Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2014. Malaquais, Dominique. 'Rumble in the Jungle: boxe, festival et politique'. Africultures 2, no. 73 (2008): 43-59. Masse, Guirdex. 'A Diasporic Encounter: The Politics of Race and Culture at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists'. PhD, Emory University, 2016. Morison, Gideon. 'From Renaissance to festivalisation: Festival networks and institutional legacies of selected pan-African cultural productions, 1977-2019'. PhD, LMU, 2022. Murphy, David. 'The Performance of Pan-Africanism: Staging the African Renaissance at the First World Festival of Negro Art'. In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies, edited by David Murphy, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016. Ratcliff, Anthony. 'When Négritude Was in Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966'. The Journal of Pan African Studies 6, no. 7 (2014): 167-86. Continue Reading

9 June 2026

In Blog, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Everything moves, or does it? Empires and im:mobility

claire louise blaser

In 1937, British India issued a series of postage stamps featuring the newly crowned King George VI. In them, the monarch shares the frame with an unlikely cast: a postman on foot, an ox cart, a horse-drawn carriage, a camel, a train, a steamer, a motorcar and an airplane (fig. 1). As David Arnold (Warwick) noted in his keynote for the workshop Empire and (im-)mobility in South and Southeast Asia, 19th and 20th centuries, this series depicts an ‘imperial ordering of mobilities’ in miniature: a visual narrative of progress from human- to animal- to machine-powered mobility that also reminds us, however, that these varied modes of transportation and communication were all connected.

Fig. 1: British India postage stamps, King George VI Transport Series, 1937. (Public domain)

Held in New Delhi on 6–7 February 2026 and co-organised by Siddharth Pandey (Munich/New Delhi) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Munich/Zurich), both fellows at gd:c, the workshop invited participants to consider how mobility and immobility have been historically shaped, enabled and enforced in relation to one another. Over two days, scholars traced the movement of bicycles, planes, machines, seamen, writers and criminals across borderlands, oceans and empires. Relating the (post)colonial contexts of South and Southeast Asia to the British and Dutch Empires, the event also sought to open transimperial perspectives on the history of im:mobility. As Arnold observed in his keynote, historians of these regions have long studied movement through migration, trade, epidemics and the circulation of ideas. The workshop’s contribution therefore lay less in demonstrating that movement has a history than in exploring the analytical utility of im:mobility for historians in terms of what it can reveal about how empires were governed and infrastructures built, how people imagined space, and how bodies experienced the world.

Fig. 2: The organisers Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Siddharth Pandey)

Fig. 3: Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Abhimanyu Pandey).

Power: regimes of im:mobility

A central theme that emerged throughout was that im:mobility makes power visible. Several contributions tackled questions like who gets to move, who gets stopped, why and how; they focused on regulation and governance, revealing colonial rule as a project that relied on controlling motion. Yet, as several papers showed, that control was always incomplete. Colonial and postcolonial regimes alike had to contend with the fact that their visions of absolute regulation of their constituents’ im:mobility were often at odds with the practicalities of implementation. Michaela Dimmers (New Delhi) demonstrated this tension in her account of British Indian prisons. Convicts, she showed, were simultaneously highly mobile through no will of their own and intensely immobile through their confinement. The penal regime aspired to total control, but the everyday realities of prison show that im:mobility was constantly negotiated and compromised in practice. Abhimanyu Pandey’s (Ahmedabad) paper focused on how im:mobility is tied up with the notion of remoteness, viewing the latter as a governmental category. In Spiti, on the Indo-Tibetan border, colonial and postcolonial regimes alternately restricted and expanded access through mobility infrastructures in the interest of state sovereignty. Focusing on a different border, Vaibhav Bhardwaj (Delhi) traced how criminal mobility became a test case for fragile state sovereignty after the partition of British India. The movement of criminals between India and Pakistan challenged newly drawn borders, turning criminal mobility into a territorial dispute and a performance of sovereignty. Similarly invoking the instability and malleability of mobility regimes after partition, Naina Manjrekar (Bombay) showed how the recruitment and movement of seamen between India and Pakistan can be read as a clash between established colonial and newly forming postcolonial regimes of im:mobility. Shivangi Jaiswal (Venice) also reflected on links between labour and mobility through a case study of Indian workers who were sent to wartime Britain for technical training in the 1940s. Her contribution demonstrated how even a colonial-era regime that explicitly sought to enable both physical and social mobility was tightly controlled and socially stratified.

Knowledge: techno-mobility, infrastructures and im:mobile ideas

A second cross-cutting theme at the workshop concerned the relationship between mobility and knowledge. In the 19th and 20th centuries, mobility and its meanings were bound to new technologies that transformed how people moved in space. Several papers explored the emergence of this modern ‘techno-mobility’: im:mobility mediated by machines, infrastructures and technical expertise. Philipp Krauer (Zurich) told the story of the ‘Java bogie’, a locomotive component that travelled from Switzerland to the Dutch East Indies and eventually to colonial India. This case study unsettles narratives of direct technological diffusion from colonial metropoles to their peripheries by including lateral transcolonial conncections and European countries without colonial possessions. Andreas Greiner (Washington, DC) traced how interwar imperial aviation forced a renegotiation of airspace sovereignty. Here, inter-imperial technological rivalry ran up against the practicalities of planning intercontinental aerial routes, forcing empires such as the Dutch, British and French into ‘involuntary interdependence’, each reliant on access to the colonial skies of others. Oishi Dhar (Mānoa) zoomed in on Bengal, where over the 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian entrepreneurs adapted steam navigation technologies and ‘vernacularized’ them, transforming the steamship into a tool of swadeshi economic self-reliance and shipping ideas of anti-colonial assertion to new shores. Arnab Dutta (Groningen) examined the Greater India Society, whose intellectuals responded to imperial restrictions on Asian mobility by imagining alternative international migration regimes; the resulting visions of, for example, an ‘Asiatic Lebensraum’ reframed im:mobility in the anti-liberal logics of biologised civilisational units and population ecology. Teuku Reza Fadeli (Jakarta) and Harald Fischer-Tiné's papers both focused on an everyday technology of mobility, the bicycle, and considered how this technology was rendered governable in colonial Indonesia and India, respectively, by restricting and policing its use. At the same time, both contributions also showed how those restrictions, which in Fischer-Tiné’s framing constituted a form of ‘mobility inequality’, gradually eroded, leading to appropriations of cycling that challenged imperial and class hierarchies.

Fig. 4: gd:c goes mobile, discussing im:mobility 6000 km from headquarters (Photo: IIC Dehli).

Experience: embodied, imagined and symbolic im:mobilities

Throughout the workshop, participants repeatedly discussed who moved, how that movement (or its absence) felt and what symbolic value it carried. Several papers attended to mobility as a bodily experience, or how walking, cycling and even standing still leaves traces in muscle and memory. Fadeli and Fischer-Tiné also focused on such aspects in their papers. In urban colonial Indonesia, for example, police manuals prescribed posture and speed for cyclists: colonial governance there was enforced by regulating the behaviour of bodies in motion. In colonial India, European observers questioned whether ‘oriental’ bodies could master the ‘steel horse’. Both contributions made clear that im:mobility was not only a question of technology and governance, but also fundamentally of cultural and social symbolism. Siddharth Pandey explored this symbolism of movement, and how it could transform over time by shining light on a unique mode of mobility: ‘malling’, as residents of Shimla describe the act of walking on the town’s Mall Road. He explained how an activity that, in the colonial era, was a symbol of racial and social segregation, could become a more democratised leisurely practice in the postcolonial period, though it continued to be seen as a performance of social and political status. Mihir Jha (Delhi) showed how railway connectivity transformed the imagination of Chhotanagpur in colonial East India. New mobility infrastructure, he argued, brought upper-class travellers from Calcutta to the region, which opened a new way of reading the landscape — one that romanticised its pastoral and picturesque character, all while obscuring the industrialisation that made it accessible. Gregory Goulding (Philadelphia) traced mobility's symbolic life through the travelogues of Rahul Sankrityayan. The writer once styled himself a free-spirited wanderer challenging imperial restrictions on movement but later deployed the tropes of travel writing to incorporate the Himalayan region of Kinnaur into the imagined space of the new nation.

What else can im:mobility do for historians?

This workshop demonstrated that the mobilities paradigm, while certainly not novel, remains what Arnold called a ‘productive provocation’ for historians of South and Southeast Asia. Bringing together these diverse papers reinforced the value of thinking about the interconnections between different forms of im:mobility, as opposed to considering each mode or machine as an isolated case study. This perspective recentres marginalised aspects of mobility history. Arnold’s call to attend to animal mobility was a particularly salient example, laying out a convincing case for a multispecies history of im:mobility. Arnold also pointed to a central methodological challenge many papers grappled with implicitly: it is difficult for historians to capture the experience of im:mobility, as they mostly encounter it through mediated forms, like photographs, travelogues or stamps, each of which carries its own conventions and agendas. Several presenters illustrated their papers with striking photographs, making evident that visual technologies have long shaped how mobility is imagined and valued. Such images did not merely document im:mobility, but actively shaped its meanings, infusing it with symbolic values like modernity, authenticity and social status. The discussions also highlighted questions for future research. Participants pointed to the need to explore the relationship between mobility and immobility more explicitly and to attend to im:mobility’s historical stratification in terms of how journeys repeat or reinvent themselves with reference to previously charted paths. Finally, one form of im:mobility remained curiously underexplored: social im:mobility. In the concluding discussion, the concept of ‘motility’ – the potential for movement as a type of social capital – was suggested as a helpful approach to consider how the (in)ability to move shaped hierarchy, aspiration and identity in colonial and postcolonial societies. Continue Reading

12 May 2026