Celebrating Memory and Imagination

From the early months of 1977, Lagos became the pounding heart of a Black African cultural revolution. Over 16,000 artists, thinkers, performers, and activists from 56 nations—spanning Africa and its extensive diaspora—flocked to Nigeria for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC '77.

FESTAC '77 was the sequel to the first festival in Dakar in 1966, but Nigeria's was boisterous, bigger, and unapologetically ambitious. The city pulsed with the rhythm of African drums, the verse of freedom, the dance of ancestral memory, and the beauty of the eye to behold a continent reclaiming its narrative for nearly a month. It was a living museum of African imagination—music, dance, literature, religion, and art all rolled into one.

At the time, Nigeria’s booming oil industry financed the festivities, and it certainly was a lavish affair. The government spent hundreds of millions on the event, constructing the symbolic National Arts Theatre and establishing bodies such as the National Council for Arts and Culture. Nigeria was set to become the cultural capital of the Black African world.

But it was not without its drawbacks, shortcomings, or criticisms. Nigeria's greatest musical icon, Fela Kuti, denounced the festival as empty pageantry. The oil boom fell apart. The National Theatre came crashing down. Subsidies for culture dried up.

Ultimately, FESTAC did not achieve everything it had originally set out to do. And yet, we can still look to it as an example of pushing the legacy—of audacity, scale, and radical vision of global Black African unity—forward. FESTAC dared to envision and bring to life Nigeria as the vanguard of continental and diasporans’ cultural expressions rooted in a shared liberation struggles.

Today, the festival only lives on through disjointed memories and faded records. It was an experiment in daring optimism—a time when Nigeria dared to imagine that it could be the hub of Black intellectual and cultural activity. So while its history is complicated, its bold creative and visionary direction is undisputed, and that spirit is the heartbeat of our upcoming exhibition, KIN: A Kinfolk Tech Festival of Memory and Imagination.

“In claiming our difference as Black women, as African Americans, we are well aware of the extent to which we bear the marks of economic exploitation and racial and sexual subordination. For this very reason, we bear within us the mark of liberation for all. Therefore, our motto must be: organize now!”

― Lélia Gonzalez

A trailblazer in Latin American thought, Léila Gonzalez bridged feminism, anti-racism, and Marxist criticism within her works. Her activism and scholarship were central to the establishment of the Black women’s movement in Brazil, disrupting sexism, anti-Black racism, and class domination. While she played a central role in the struggle, she brought along with her representatives of Quilombola communities and poor Black women, as the governmental shifts were happening in Brazil. Gonzalez’s work connected local struggles to those happening around the globe, offering a unique Afro-Latin and Amerindian lens she often referred to as Améfrica Ladina—a vision that reimagines Latin America’s cultural and political futures.

🔎 Discover more about Léila Gonzalez during our upcoming exhibition KIN: A Festival of Memory and Imagination October 10–November 2 at WSA in New York City. Download the Kinfolk App on your mobile device to explore other activists and leaders of Black, Brown, and Queer history.

KIN: A Kinfolk Tech Festival of Memory and Imagination Begins October 10

KIN: A Kinfolk Tech Festival of Memory and Imagination is opening Friday October 10 and running until Sunday to November 2. Kinfolk Tech will transform the WSA building in Downtown Manhattan into an immersive, living archive—a constellation of portals into collective memory and imagination.

We’re living through a moment of erasure by design—digitally, politically, environmentally. This exhibition is our cultural counter-spell: a space to slow down, reconnect, and resist disappearance. KIN will showcase the importance of the archive, giving people hands-on access to the stories, monuments, and knowledge necessary to reimagine our future. KIN will feature a range of communal experiences for rest and repair as well including workshops, panels, musical performances, a reading room and archive, a marketplace, and a cafe. 

We’re overjoyed to be presenting this immersive exhibition and celebration and we hope you’ll join us over the course of our month-long experience, starting with our opening celebration Friday October 10. 

Follow us on Instagram to keep up with everything that will be happening week to week during KIN.

Reclaiming Space

We want to hear from our community, what does reclaiming space look like to you? We are collecting responses for an immersive experience during our upcoming exhibition KIN, that explores the connections between community, memory, and storytelling.

Preliminary data collected from the questionnaire may be included in the public exhibit, helping to shape how stories of kinship and connection are represented. Thank you for adding your voice to this collective exploration.

📲 Download the Kinfolk App → Explore our AR archive

📡 Follow us on social media → Instagram | LinkedIn

💲 Donate to Kinfolk Tech Foundation → Help expand Kinfolk’s narrative offerings

Until next time,

angie, carissa, dele, josh and the Kinfolk team