The quest for a Pan-African groove: saxophones and stories from the Pan-African Festival of Algiers (1969)

Abstract

In a 2014 interview, African-American saxophonist Archie Shepp reflected on his star performance with Touareg musicians at the Pan-African Festival of Algiers of 1969. ‘The Touaregs are a bit different from playing in the Congo, the groove is different’, he mused. ‘I’m not sure when we first got together that the people on the Touareg side understood what I was trying to do. I think I might have been closer to the traditional African where the drums are much more important’ (Archie Shepp, interview with Eloi Ficquet; Archives des Festivals Panafricains. https://archive.org/details/PANAFESTArchieShepp). Black people from across Africa and from around the world flocked to participate in an event dedicated to exhibiting and constructing African culture. In Algeria, they hoped to find the key to African unity and, for some, a homeland. But North Africa’s central role in the festival served to radically challenge and transform the foundations on which many participants believed pan-Africanism rested. With the help of interviews, press releases, personal journals, visuals arts, poetry, and music I explore how these Black figures encountered North African culture, as well as the effects their time in Algeria had both on their sense of race and on the ways they expressed race through their art. The experience of art-making in Algeria triggered, sometimes unconsciously, many of these artists and intellectuals to rethink ingrained notions of race and racial hierarchies. Archie Shepp is but one of the Black artists present at the Pan-African Festival of Algiers, who, under the cover of a conversation about instruments and ‘groove’, is reconfiguring his own and others’ racial identity.

Keywords:

• Pan-Africanism
• Maghreb
• festival
• Algiers

Notes on contributor

Paraska Tolan Szkilnik is a Ph.D Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on a dissertation that explores the reach of panafricanism in the Maghreb of the 1960s and 70s. She lives between Philadelphia and Paris.

Notes

1 Scholar Daulatzai (2012, 48) emphasizes the role that Malcolm and the Nation of Islam played in turning Black American radicals’ gaze towards North Africa, explaining that they ‘provided a conduit for a profound trafficking of ideas between Black radical thought and the Muslim Third World in the post–World War II period, ideas that were deeply inflected with the politics of decolonization and anti-racism. For it was Malcolm X who said, “Islam is the greatest unifying force in the Dark World today”’. Melani McAlister argues a similar point in her article ‘One Black Allah: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955–1970’. The Nation of Islam had a tremendous cultural impact in Black American communities (even among those who were not converts) and on Black American culture, she claims: ‘The centrality of the Middle East to Islamic histories and to many Muslim rituals encouraged the increasing visibility of Arab cultures and Arab politics in African American communities’ (McAlister 1999, 625). American Muslims such as Malcolm X looked to the Middle East and North Africa for inspiration in practising Islam and achieving liberation from racism in the United States. Algeria, in particular, came to occupy a central place in the Black American radical imagination. Algeria’s predicament, and more generally the plight of all North Africans, were widely discussed among radical Black Americans. Violent images of the Algerian war had crossed the Atlantic and many Black Americans moved Algeria to the forefront of their vision of Africa; the Algerian struggle against colonialism became the go-to revolutionary symbol.