The African Peace Festival has been going on every year for the past four years, and for some strange reason, I’d never heard of it until recently. What kind of African am I?
As luck would have it, I met one of the performers weeks earlier at the jazz festival who promised it’ll be fun.
The festival is organized by the African Peace Forum Society to raise funds ‘for a grassroots humanitarian project in Africa which is selected annually’.
This year’s festival was held at the Roundhouse Community Centre on the 18th of July. I went there not exactly sure what to expect.
I imagined a peace festival would be a conference style sort of atmosphere with workshops and possibly breakout sessions where there’ll be lots of vague talk about how to bring peace to ‘Africa’. This isn’t exactly how I wanted to spend my Saturday afternoon.
Thankfully, it wasn’t anything like I imagined. It was a market place with a performance stage and seating area in the middle. I really liked the set up because I could browse, watch and listen to the performances too.
The market place featured an array of interesting vendors;
Pathfinder Press publishes writings and speeches from revolutionists like Thomas Sankara.
Afri-Pads is a Ugandan based organization that sews and distributes washable menstrual pads to girls in rural Uganda – it’s such an exceptional enterprise.
Performances included a poetry slam, musical acts and an acrobat dancer. Saw the Raging Grannies!
Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the whole event because I had to be at the Folk Festival.
It was overall great fun; I’m glad I was there, saw some old friendly faces and discovered new ones.
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