A showcase of the Black diaspora: exploring New York’s 43rd annual International African Arts Festival

Written by Marisa Guerrero

This Fourth of July weekend, the foundation of the United States was not the only thing being celebrated. While the city flocked to the banks of the East River to watch New York City’s annual fireworks show, thousands more flocked to Commodore Barry Park in Brooklyn for the 43rd annual International African Arts Festival.
The International African Arts Festival was founded in 1971 as the “African Street Carnival,” a fundraiser for an independent school in Brooklyn, and has since grown into a community event that attracts roughly 75,000 people per year from miles around. The festival is characterized by a variety of events: an African Marketplace featuring a vast array of product and food vendors, games and activities, activist outreach, symposiums, cultural performances, a parade, several concerts and dance shows, a fashion show, and a martial arts demonstration.

Walking through the park, we encountered a Tanzanian coffee vendor (whose earnings fund a school in her village in Tanzania), a Nigerian soaps and cosmetics shop owner, various Senegalese clothing and jewelry vendors, New York-based activists and organizations, African-inspired fashion designers, religious and spiritual leaders, and a Rastafari product vendor, among many, many more. The marketplace’s name – the African Marketplace – is a bit misleading, as it features vendors who represent all aspects of the black diaspora: African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean. The festival is truly an international one, and at that, an intercontinental and intercultural one as well.

The diversity of the festival’s participants reflects the great diversity of African immigration to the United States. American and African-American histories are intertwined stories; African immigration, initially forced immigration, begins at the starting point of our nation’s modern history. The first Africans were transported across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 16th century, just a decade after Columbus’ first arrival, and were brought to the current-day United States in 1526, decades before the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia. Starting in 1625, thousands of Africans were brought to New York City through the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Then, after the abolition of slavery in 1865, several waves of internal migration brought newly freed African-Americans from South to North.

The 20th century saw both internal migrations and an unparalleled rate of international immigration. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act replaced previous US immigration policy, which centered on ethnically-based immigration quotas, with a preference system that focused on immigrant skills and family relationships with US citizens and permanent residents. The implementation of this new immigration system opened the doors of the country to African immigrants, while at the same time, independence movements throughout Africa in the latter half of the 20th century and ensuing  corruption and political instability created a context conducive to emigration. An unprecedented number of Africans began to make their way to the United States.  Many students came to pursue higher education, skilled professionals in search of better jobs and economic opportunities  obtained employment-based visas, refugees fleeing violence and political oppression were resettled, and many more joined family members already in the US  on family-based visas. Several thousands of Africans settled in New York City, particularly Ghanaian and Nigerian immigrants, won their right of entry thanks to the Diversity Visa lottery established by the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act,  which aimed to maintain a diverse US immigrant population.

Today, with a population numbering over 1.6 million, Africans constitute about 4 percent of immigrants in the United States. 95 percent of African immigrants live in metropolitan areas, and the largest such community is found in New York City, particularly in the northern part of Queens, several areas of the Bronx, and Harlem. West African immigrants, especially from Ghana and Nigeria, make up a significant proportion of these populations. Thousands of the approximately 128,000 African immigrants living in New York today are drawn to the International African Arts Festival every year, and we were able to talk to a few this weekend.

“To me, the festival is a showcase,” explained Victoria, owner of Philadelphia-based herbal cosmetics store Chic Afrique, “a showcase of the cultures and people of all ages who make up our community.” Victoria succinctly summed up the weekend’s events: a way for many cultures to come together and celebrate a common cultural heritage.

Her story, too, seemed to epitomize the spirit of the festival; she moved to New York from Nigeria to study, and in that time began working at the festival helping out another vendor. Years later, with degrees in Physiology, Pharmacology, and Industrial Pharmacy and Cosmetic Science, she found herself once again at the festival, this time as an entrepreneur and the owner of her own cosmetics line and store. She makes the trip out from Philadelphia every year to participate in the Brooklyn festival. Victoria’s 30-year relationship with the festival represents the spirit of the event; it is an opportunity for the African community – immigrants and US-born alike – to come together, share their experiences, and support each other year after year.

Political and social activism were also an integral part of the celebration. Upon entering the festival, attendees were greeted on either side by activist booths promoting causes ranging from media advocacy for underrepresented voices (namely, though not exclusively, women of color), to medical services and support for those in need, to a campaign to support the “boycott of apartheid” in the Dominican Republic. In the same political vein, many booths prominently featured political imagery, some selling photos and artwork of black leaders of the past and present – for example of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack and Michelle Obama. On the main stage, political themes were prevalent as well. During a martial arts demonstration, the teenage boys onstage introduced their work as a means of “stepping into the future, dismissing racial barriers” that hold them back in the reality of race relations in the United States.

African immigrants in the US form part of a community that is intertwined with that of African-Americans in the US – the two groups no doubt have a different history, but often share some sense of identity and belonging to a common cultural legacy. The political and social undertones of the festival relate to both communities, and furthermore, to the point of intersection between the two, as immigrants encounter US race relations upon their arrival. The main stage featured a traditional African dance set followed immediately by a marching band playing contemporary pop hits by black artists; vendors selling tribal patterns and traditional African jewelry sat alongside vendors selling Southern soul food or promoting African-American cultural events.

The International African Arts Festival is perhaps a celebration not of simply African arts, but of the black diaspora, including African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean culture. At this event, one that is both politically charged and at the same time thoroughly celebratory, a multitude of black cultures come together in diasporic solidarity as they celebrate what is perhaps the true foundation of American culture, not the July 4th signing of the Declaration of Independence, but the multicultural populations that make up the core of the United States.

For more information on the International African Arts Festival, visit their website at http://www.iaafestival.org.