Festival of Ideas: Music of the Pan-African Revolution
Starting right at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Pan-African idea is a story of new beginnings that resisted, and eventually defeated, economic, social and cultural domination by European colonial empires.
Within this DJ salon Lynda Rosenior-Patten (DJ Ade) and June Reid (Junie Rankin) aka Nzinga Soundz, one of the UK’s first Black female sound systems, and Martin Evans, curator of the 2019 exhibition Paris-Londres. Music Migrations. 1962-89, will play selected tracks and discuss how the Pan-Africanist movement was expressed in song.
Moderated by the cultural programmer Karina H-Maynard, this conversation will take us on a journey from Soweto via Dakar and Lagos to Algiers as well as Paris, London and New York, taking in the music of Miriam Makeba, Brenda Fassie, Fela Kuti, Cheikha Rimitti, Abdullah Ibrahim, Baba Maal and Alpha Blondy and many more. This DJ salon will foreground the new ways of being, seeing and listening to music that were at the heart of the Pan-African Revolution on the continent but also Black Power and anti-racist movements amongst the African Diaspora in Britain, France and USA.
The DJ Salon will be followed by a sound system event with Nzinga Soundz and Karina H-Maynard.
A collaboration with the University of Sussex, Festival of Ideas harnesses the transformative power of the arts and humanities to fashion new ways of thinking about the past, present and future.
