In the midst of turmoil, people across Africa are organizing!
Coups across the Sahel, brutal civil wars in the Sudan and Somalia, mass uprisings of youth and the poor in Nigeria and Kenya, political upheaval in South Africa. Yet ordinary people on the ground are working, with increasing success, to “Create the Power.” Come and meet some of them at Performing the World 2024.
Friday Sept 27 | 12:15 – 1:45 pm EDT (UTC-4)
Presenters: Gerard Bester, Sibahle Mangena, Stacy Hardy, Thabang Matsaung
The Windybrow Arts Centre, located in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, South Africa, is a social hub and creative spark for the community’s young people. Associated with the world-famous Market Theatre, it provides arts and literacy programmes for young people and generates socially engaged plays, performance pieces, music and street theatre created and performed by the young participants.
The session will focus on the creation and performance of “Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into Hillbrow Night,” a collectively created poem/performance piece inspired by the Martinican poet and playwright Aimé Césaire’s 1939 surrealist classic “Notebook of a Return to The Native Land.” Working with Stacy Hardy, Head of the Creative Writing Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, a group of Windybrow participants, calling themselves “Césaire Youth” reimagined and transposed Césire’s poem into a reflection and embodiment of their community today.
The session will be hosted by Hardy and Thabang Lucky Matsaung, one of the young artists involved in the project. Together they will provide background on Windybrow, share the process of the poem’s creation and introduce performances from the poem. Then, the creators of “Notebook of a Long Day’s Journey into Hillbrow Night” will have a public conversation with students from Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Sunday Sept 29 | 10:30 am – 12 pm EDT (UTC-4)
Presenters: Brian Mathenge, Mary Njeri, Minoo Kyaa, Otien O’Brian
Join Minoo Kyaa, a leader of the Mathare Social Justice Center’s (MSJC) Traveling Theatre, as he shares the history and ongoing activity of MSJC. Founded in 2015 in Mathare, a vast slum in Nairobi that is home to 500,000 people, MSJC is independently funded and sustained by the people it fights for and has inspired and helped lead the foundation of 30 other Social Justice Centers in Nairobi, 52 throughout Kenya. MSJC works on many fronts: extrajudicial killings (mostly of young men) by the police; the Mathare Green Movement, which focuses on water rights; reproductive and gender justice; and disability justice. They have organized the Matigare Book Club (which is dedicated to the great playwright, novelist and activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o), the MSJC Kids Social Justice Center, and, featured here, the dynamic Mathare Social Justice Center Traveling Theatre.
Sunday Sept 29 | 12:15 – 1:15 pm EDT (UTC-4)
Create the Power: Nigeria
Presenters: Elizabeth Adams Oyarese (host), Oladoyin Idowu, Aminat Abdulsalam, Zakari Emmanuel, GIFT Chikere, Samuel James Femi
Facing a repressive neo-colonial government that has sold its soul to the foreign oil industry, its financial independence to the International Monetary Fund, and is ineffective against the Boko Haram terrorists in the north, the people of Nigeria are in the midst of their second youth-led uprising in four years. Even as they “Fight the Power” in the streets, they are “Creating the Power” at the grassroots. This session brings together five of those helping to generate people’s power on the ground.
Organized and hosted by Elizabeth Adams Oyarese, founder of Linking Circles Academy, alumna of the East Side Institute’s International Class, brigadier of the Global Play Brigade, ambassador of Street Project Foundation and the secretary general of its Youth Advisory Board.
Meet: Gift Chikere (aka The Gift), an alumni of Street Project Foundation, has spearheaded the organization of ARTvocacy, which grew out of the 2020 youth uprising against police violence and extrajudicial killing; Oladoyin Idowu is the founder and director of One Word Africa, dedicated to raising awareness about dyslexia in Nigeria and throughout Africa; Aminat Abdulsalam, is the founder of Techkiddies, an organization which works to make Nigerian kids tech-savvy “one byte at a time;” Samuel James Femi, professional dancer and founder of DeafCanDance, brings deaf youth throughout Nigeria into skilled dance companies; Zakari Emmanuel, a spoken world poet, an alumni of ARTvocacy and Executive Director of youth-led, Udama for Africa.