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Nigeria’s Festac festival, which cost over a billion dollars in today’s money, was an Olympic Games of pan-African culture – with Stevie Wonder the joyous headliner
Staged in Lagos, Nigeria, Festac 77 (The Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture, to give it its full name) was the cultural climax of the Pan-African movement, gathering musicians, dancers, fashion designers, artists and writers representing 70 countries from Africa and the African diaspora. It was a show of worldwide black unity and self-determination, and the catalyst for Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti’s anti-government protests. It was also the platform for Stevie Wonder to consolidate his affinity with the continent.
Festac 77 was big on a more prosaic level, too. Indeed, to even call it a “festival” in the contemporary sense would be doing it a disservice – this was Olympic Games scale. Four weeks of events across 10 venues including the specially built 5,000 capacity National Theatre; 15,000 participants housed in 5,000 high-end apartments and two luxury hotels, again all built for the event; a network of highways created to avoid Lagos’s legendary traffic congestion. It was 12 years in the planning, during which time it survived a civil war, a presidential assassination and two coups (one successful, one not) and the bill came in at $400m, or $1.75bn in today’s money. Continue reading...