Entre le discours programmatique et le manifeste en action : le Premier festival mondial des arts nègres (Dakar, 1966) et le Premier festival panafricain (Alger, 1969)

This article aims to analyse the place of culture and literature in the intellectual discourse that accompanied the World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, 1966) and the First Pan-African Festival (Algiers, 1969). The two events seem antagonistic in that the former constitutes the apogee of Negritude while the latter aspires to sound the death knell for the conceptions embodied by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire. While the interventions of the latter two, during the Dakar Festival, appear to be a “defence and illustration” of the idea of a multi-secular communion of Blacks from all over the world, the Pan-African Cultural Manifesto of the OAU, the fundamental text of the Algiers Festival, attempts to reorient the reflection on Pan-Africanism, which would no longer draw its source from the past, but from the effort to take up the challenges related to the decolonisation of Africa in the middle of the 20th century. However, beyond these oppositions, the two festivals perpetuate a discourse marked by a constant circulation of ideas and concepts, where polemics go hand in hand with strategies of recuperation and reappropriation. The scope of this discourse, which claims to lay the foundations of African culture, must also be compared to the performative force of the festivities on the programme of the two events, for the concerts, exhibitions and direct encounters between the artists and their audience shape the latter’s perception and aesthetic sensitivity.

Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Center, Poland)