Carnival in Africa

| african arts WINTER 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 4 Tourism-fueled economies in Africa and the travel industry produce photo-rich websites with seductive, color-saturated images that draw people to fabulous carnivals across the continent. These industries have vastly outpaced scholarly documentation of carnivals in Africa, which are often assumed to be an isolated and recent phenomenon, but in fact exist in all corners of the continent— Morocco, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and Kenya to name a few. Some are very new—although usually built upon an existing performance tradition—while others, such as in Angola and Cape Verde, are thought to be centuries old. As carnival events are growing in popularity, we hope this collection of articles will encourage others (scholars, artists, communities) to join the party and experience the complexity of carnival in Africa. At this time, we know of only two full-length books about carnivals in Africa: Coon Carnival New Year in Cape Town: Past to Present (1999) by Denis-Constant Martin and Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana (2021) by Courtnay Micots. Many other carnivals are mentioned in disparate texts covering diverse regions and disciplines—a fair number published in African Arts. However, many references to carnivals in Africa fly under the radar because authors do not use the term “carnival” even when the event fits the definition of carnival or includes many characteristics of carnival. Until now, the literature on carnival has primarily focused on the Caribbean and Latin American epicenters. The weather vane of carnival history and theory indicates a strong wind blowing steadfast out of Trinidad & Tobago and Brazil (with carnivals that are well known among revelers and scholars alike), but this special issue hints at the vast scope of carnivals in Africa and the geographic decentering of carnival studies. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that Africa is not only a point of origin to explain diasporic performance traditions, Africa is also a place of return and reinvention—disrupting linear models of influence. Humans have found many reasons to form processions and dance in the street. Factors that contributed to carnivals in Africa include the Portuguese (early super-spreaders of Christian festivals and processions), emancipated returnees from the Americas, British maritime culture (suppliers of goods, ideas, and people among the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa), diplomatic programs and global festivals (e.g., the First World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 in Senegal and FESTAC ’77 in Nigeria), and the intensification of globalization and shifts in the economy (moving from oil to tourism in Nigeria, for example). Another important piece of the puzzle is that festivals were almost always built upon the many preexisting performance traditions involving processions and masquerades. Carnivals in Africa are responses to multicultural societies and power dynamics within the continent. The articles in this issue cover a variety of performance events, and the authors—who come from diverse disciplines and are at various stages in their careers—address four festivals from the coastal region of West Africa. The case studies include long-established carnivals (Fancy Dress in Ghana), festivals of recent import from the Americas (Calabar Carnival in Nigeria), older festivals that have become carnivals (Batanga Carnival in Cameroon), and annual festivals that tap into carnivalesque elements yet are not carnivals per se (Epé Ekpé festivals in Togo). Even so, these case studies are a small slice of a much larger story that could potentially shift how we look at carnival and the trajectory of research moving forward.