‘It wasn’t a dream, it was a threat’: the film festival celebrating pan-Africanism’s rich and complex history

Project a Black Planet: Film, a new season of screenings at the Barbican in London exemplifies how the movement was an act of solidarity, resistance and fierce creativity

Algiers, 1969. What had, for seven years, been the metropolis of a newly independent country became, over the course of 12 days in July, the cosmopolitan centre of an entire continent. That summer, Algeria played host to the first Pan-African Cultural festival (Panaf) and the capital’s streets were transformed into a vista of energising performers, flanked by placards announcing each country’s delegation: Ethiopia, Liberia, Mali.

Picture an Olympics-style opening ceremony, then discard it, for the images captured in William Klein’s documentary of the event, The Pan-African Festival of Algiers, hint at the very dissolving of barriers between spectacle and spectator – an act that brings to life a quote, shown on screen, from Guinea’s first president Sékou Touré: “We must make this revolution with the people … and the songs will come.”
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