By Rotimi Fasan

DECEMBER 2010 was Dakar, the capital city of Senegal’s, week of festival. From 10th of December to 31st the country hosted the 3rd World Black Festival of Arts and Culture otherwise known as FESTAC.

In 1966, Senegal under its first president, one of Africa’s leading poets and cultural exponents, Leopold Sedar Senghor, hosted the first ever edition of FESTAC. Eleven years after Senegal, the Festival moved to Nigeria. Between January and February 1977 Lagos, then Federal Capital and a few other major cities in Nigeria, hosted what was until then the largest gathering of black people from all over the world.

Tagged FESTAC ’77, the Festival was a loud statement of Nigeria’s potential as the undisputed leader of the Black World. 33 years down the line what hope the rest of the world might have entertained about the country’s leadership has since evaporated.

The National Arts Theatre in Iganmu now enjoying some kind of rebirth after years of complete neglect and the sprawling conurbation, more or less a huge blight on the face of the city, formerly called FESTAC Village but now known as FESTAC Town are among the few subsisting legacies of FESTAC.

There were talks of Nigeria hosting the 3rd edition of FESTAC or doing something towards a revival of the spirit that animated the Festival around 2002, to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1977 event. Many of the recordings and materials from FESTAC said to be languishing in the basement of the National Theatre were among the things that the 25th anniversary was supposed to salvage. The late culture activist, Steve Rhodes, had cause to talk about this on several occasions in public.

Nothing came out of it all. This was perhaps not surprising for FESTAC ’77 has come to be labelled by sections of Nigeria’s religious establishment as Nigeria’s celebration of idolatry and, consequently, the beginning of the country’s downward slide into the valley of poverty and social ills.

But it might be saying too much to claim that it was this fear of reviving the spirit of ‘evil’ that FESTAC was supposed to connote that the 2010 edition of the Festival in Dakar was virtually blacked out of the Nigerian media. I guess one can say one of the reasons not much was heard about it was a result of poor publicity and general planning of the event on the part of the Senegalese.

The sheer scale and extent of the festival evidently swamped the organisers. Not the least of these organisational challenges was how logistical matters were handled. There was near total breakdown in communication among the organisers and participants.

My participation at the Festival was as an academic, to be part of the series of conferences and symposia that were designed to run through the weeks of the event. My memory of FESTAC ’77 is quite faint and I therefore looked forward to the Dakar episode with some expectations.

About seven years before I had been in Dakar for another academic event organised by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) then headed by Nigeria’s Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, formerly of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA). Thus, my visit last December should have been some kind of homecoming to the French speaking country. It should, in a sense, have been an improvement on my first visit which was in every sense very pleasant and memorable.

But the December trip was far from that and the challenges began right from Nigeria.

Apart from the logistical challenge caused by the Senegalese which delayed my departure by more than one week, the peculiar incompetence of Nigeria’s airline operators was on full display to ensure a further delay of one additional day.  Once in Dakar, the organisational challenges that had confronted one in Nigeria became evident again and would persist until my departure. A trip that was to have lasted 12 days would eventually end just after three days.

Although the Senegalese were warm and prepared to be good hosts until 31st of December, there was no point staying more than three days as the rest of the events were limited to performances. A special conference session about Nigeria at which some of us Nigerians were to participate was to be organised to coincide with the visit of President Goodluck Jonathan to the Festival.

The conference organisers made mention of it and Nigeria’s airport officials, as one would learn at the Lagos Airport,  had noticed that the President was to be in Dakar days earlier. In the end, the President didn’t make the trip and there was no explanation for his absence.

Generally, it was as if Nigeria was blacked out of the entire event. Nigeria’s silence at the 2010 FESTAC was a big minus in my estimation for a country that was the last host of the Festival. Of course, the lack of any obvious official involvement by Nigeria is not to say Nigerians were not there in their individual right but some official recognition would have gone a long way. Moreover, an event of this nature was not one that should be ignored for immense is the cultural and political mileage to be gained from it.

This much was obvious as the Senegalese made so much out of the hosting of the Festival. President Abdoulaye Wade was a regular at the conferences and at 84 displayed a staggering grasp of issues than can be said for many of our leaders. He held forth for hours at a time and without any reading aid.

Much in the mould of ideologically aware leaders like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, he has a clear-eyed view of the direction Africa should go. The question of Africa’s unity and integration and the modalities for its implementation within the fold of a United States of Africa was one very much alive on the lips of the President whose moderation of the conference talks was peppered with intellectual allusions and excursions into history. This should not be surprising, perhaps, for a leader who was a former teacher and scholar.

He was the father figure that knew how his household should be ruled. One other leader that came up for mention in President Wade’s dream of a United States of Africa was Muammar Gaddafi of Libya- this despite, for me, what I consider the shenanigans of the Libyan leader to Africans south of the Sahara. Something in the manner of the Senegalese gave one the impression that the age-long suspicion of Nigeria’s role in Africa among French speaking countries is still very much alive.

Nigeria has a duty to reach out more, pull her weight more and seize the initiative that her potential if not her present condition entitles her as leader of the Black world.