The Photographer Who Documented a Long-Forgotten Pan-African Festival

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

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Summary

Forty-six years ago, a young photographer named Marilyn Nance got the opportunity of a lifetime. A student at the Pratt Institute, an art school in Brooklyn, Nance had never left the country. But she became one of the official photographers documenting a festival in Lagos, Nigeria, called FESTAC ’77. The monthlong festival featured artists from across Africa and the diaspora, and has been described as the most important Black cultural event of the twentieth century. But, on returning from the festival, Nance didn’t find any takers to publish her photos, and fifty years later, few people know it took place. “I thought I would be talking about FESTAC in 1978, not in 2022,” Nance told the staff writer Julian Lucas. “If some tragic thing had happened, everybody would remember. . . . But I guess maybe there was no investment in celebrating Black joy.” A collection of Nance’s photographs from the event was published late in 2022, in the book “Last Day in Lagos.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:12.7	46 years ago, a young photographer named Marilyn Nance got the opportunity of a lifetime.
0:19.5	Nance was a 23-year-old student at the Pratt Institute, an art school in Brooklyn, and
0:24.2	she had never left the country.
0:26.4	But she became one of the official photographers to document a festival called Festac 77,
0:32.2	which was held in Lagos, Nigeria.
0:35.3	Festac was huge and arts and culture festival featuring artists from across Africa and
0:40.7	the diaspora.
0:42.1	Nance spent a month soaking up the atmosphere and preserving its spirit in photographs
0:46.9	that are only now being published in a book called Last Day in Lagos.
0:52.0	Marilyn Nance talked with our staff writer Julian Lucas about her experience and why so many
0:57.2	of us have never heard of Festac 77.
1:06.6	Festac 77 was, it was like a woodstock.
1:12.9	It was like a biennial.
1:15.0	There were art exhibitions.
1:17.0	It was like the Olympics because we all marched around a stadium in our national dress.
1:24.6	It was a meeting of African folks from all over the world.
1:29.3	All the roots and our heart in black culture and African culture was incredible.
1:34.4	And I looked around at the sea of black faces and I had never seen a collection of black
1:39.7	people larger than New York, larger than America.
1:43.0	And this was the largest collection of black people.
	...

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