The Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies, under the auspices of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana is hosting the 3rd Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Intellectual and Cultural Festival which will take place from Monday, 20th – Friday, 24th September 2021.

The main festival would be preceded by a 3-day youth and film festival that will take place from 15th – 17th September.

The theme of this year’s Festival is “Pan Africanism, Feminism and the Next Generation: Liberating the Cultural Economy”. The theme is in line with Kwame Nkrumah’s ideology of self-reliance and freedom from imperialism.

This year’s festival sets out to celebrate and showcase the beauty, ingenuity, and creativity of African cultural production. It will provide a vibrant transgenerational platform for intellectual debate on the kind of cultural and economic architecture required to turn Africa’s material and cultural resources into decent livelihoods and wellbeing for African people.

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s festival will be an audacious and visionary experiment intended to advance digitalisation for African purposes. The events will be digitally curated and live-streamed globally over the internet for the first time.

The 3-day youth curated Festival, ‘YouthFirst’ will celebrate the creativity and inventiveness of Africa’s youth across the continent and in the diaspora. It will demonstrate the immense potential of young African people and reflect on the unique conditions facing the next generation.

The Youth First curators call on all young Africans to join them in telling their stories, to inspire new visions of a continent that values future generations and places African youth firmly at the helm of their own affairs.

The 5-day main Festival brings together the best of Africa’s cultural workers, academics, activists and practitioners from various sectors of the African and global cultural economy to contribute to a truly Pan African discourse.

This makes for a powerful and rich programme that includes: symposia and political discussions, dance and musical performances, film screening, an exhibition of art, as well as the demonstration of inventions and technological
innovations galvanized by African women, the youth and other 21st century movements intent on ensuring a better future for Africa and the world. Pan Africanism cannot remain an old patriarchal heritage dominated by ideas and ways of the past.

This year’s festival is animated by the new generations of women, youth and forward-looking men. Together we re-populate and transform our cultures, economies and ecologies redirecting them to our collective and
public interest so that Africans do not just survive but grow, create and thrive in the future that
we herald