Festac ’77: The 2nd World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Chimurenga Ed.)

Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists and scholars from Africa and the black diaspora assembled in Lagos for Festac ’77, the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture. With a radically ambitious agenda underwritten by Nigeria’s newfound oil wealth, Festac ’77 would unfold as a complex, glorious and excessive culmination of a half-century of transatlantic and pan-Africanist cultural-political gatherings. This is the first publication to consider Festac in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible.