The FESTAC of sports

Odegbami

I urge everyone reading this to patiently allow the juices of their imagination, creativity and audacity to flow. Imagine an event somewhere in Africa, or the Caribbeans, that holds every few years.

All the countries in Africa, as well as countries with a large population of Diaspora Africans (people of African-descent), a 76-country membership of the Black Race, assemble their most gifted musicians, painters, poets, actors, dancers, drummers, sculptors, literary giants and others, for a festival that showcases their exceptional gifts of rich African traditions, their stories told in a spectacular display of artistic expressions that leave the world in breathless awe and wonder.

During the same festival, intellectuals with diverse backgrounds in scholarship are drawn from the different participating countries to interrogate their race’s past and present, and peer into the crystal ball of possibilities into the future; plan to create and present a united front to the rest of the world in order to be heard and to be taken seriously; set a common agenda that will protect and promote their collective interests as a race; design a simple road-map of implementation for the future – a collaboration as one people participating on an equal footing and on a level playing field with the rest of the world in a battle of the races without an end in sight that the Black race has been fighting and losing for five Centuries.

It is not easy to find the right way through the labyrinth of the present world system that is not designed so that the Black race can compete fairly or succeed.

The festival of arts and culture was a great concept, to promote the emancipation and elevation of the Black race through the soft diplomacy that