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Sharing Archives: The World Festival of Black Arts, Dakar 1966 (FMAN)

Technologies of Memory

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Sharing Archives: The World Festival of Black Arts, Dakar 1966 (FMAN)

From April 1 to 24 1966, Dakar was the stage of an event that attracted thousands of spectators from around the world, the first World Festival of Black Arts. Under the auspices of UNESCO, this vast event was organised by the Senegalese government and the Society of African Culture, an international network structured around the influential journal Présence africaine. The goal was ambitious; the festival aimed to be both the expression and the vector of a new society in light of the promises of African independence movements. The institutional archives (which are largely available to the public) of this first pan-African cultural festival are dispersed over different institutions throughout Europe (in France and Switzerland primarily), as well as Senegal. The key issue of this project is to create a map of these collections – partly accessible since 2016 without a request for derogation – to contextualise and describe them (inventories and research instruments) coherently. It also aims to digitalise them (when they are not already digital), and to make them accessible to all though a shared scientific portal that will redirect users to the digital collection of each institution. In the long term, this portal will also direct users to all the public and private collections documenting the complex history of this festival.