Dakar 66: The World’s First Black Arts Festival
Fifty years ago, in April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora—including Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes and Josephine Baker—gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in this landmark festival, originally called the ‘First World Festival of Negro Arts’.
This event will feature screenings of two documentary films, one American, one Russian, which capture the diversity and vitality of the festival but also the complex ways in which it became bound up in Cold War politics.
The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion, led by Professor David Murphy (University of Stirling).
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