Professor Amina Mama
This year’s edition of the annual Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Intellectual and Cultural Festival will take place from Monday, September 20 to Friday September 24, 2021, the organisers have announced.
The festival themed: “Pan Africanism, Feminism and the Next Generation: Liberating the Cultural Economy” would be preceded by a three-day Youth and Film Festival from September 15 to 17.
This year’s event which is the third edition would be hosted by the current Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies, Professor Amina Mama, under the auspices of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon.
According to the organisers, the festival sought to celebrate and showcase the beauty, ingenuity, and creativity of African cultural production.
The added that it would provide a vibrant transgenerational platform for intellectual debate on the kind of cultural and economic architecture required to turn Africa’s material and cultural resources into decent livelihoods and well-being for African people.
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s festival would be digitally curated and live-streamed globally over the internet for the first time.
A statement issued by the organisers mentioned that the main festival would be preceded by a three-day youth curated festival, ‘Youth First’, and would be devoted to celebrating the creativity and inventiveness of Africa’s youth across the continent and in the diaspora.
It would demonstrate the immense potential of young African people and reflect on the unique conditions facing the next generation.
“The Youth First curators are calling on all young Africans to join them in telling their stories, to inspire new visions of a continent that values future generations and places African youth firmly at the helm of their own affairs,” the statement said.
Similarly, the five-day main festival would assemble the best of Africa’s cultural workers, academics, activists and practitioners from various sectors of the African and global cultural economy to contribute to a truly Pan African discourse.
“This makes for a powerful and rich programme that includes: symposia and political discussions, dance and musical performances, film screening, an exhibition of art, as well as the demonstration of inventions and technological innovations galvanised by African women, the youth and other 21st century movements intent on ensuring a better future for Africa and the world,” it said.