Africana Center to host first Africana Festival

The Africana Center is holding the inaugural Africana Festival under the theme "We Are Africana" on the Tisch Library Roof this Saturday afternoon.

The festival will be sponsored by the recently created Africana Advisory Alliance, an unofficial group formed to connect black affinity groups with the Africana Center, according to Airian Williams, a member of the festival's performance subcommittee.

According to Williams, a senior, the festival will feature performances from various student groups, including all-female step team ENVY, West African Music and Dance Ensemble Kiniwe, female a cappella group Essence, BlackOut Step Team, Spoken World Alliance at Tufts, African Dance Collective, male a capella group S-Factor and the historically African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi. There will also be a steel drum performance by first-year Isaiah Thomas.

“[The festival] allows students of color to see groups of color perform, and to see them showcased outside of the very, very busy events fair, so that people of color can see other people of color in groups very exclusively in an intimate setting,” Williams, who is also the president of S-Factor, said.

Williams said that different student leaders from performance and professional groups of color on campus have all come together for this festival.

"[We] tried to all be in the same room so we can do more creative events that better serve the community [and] communities of color on campus,” he said.

According to Williams, the theme of the festival, "We Are Africana," is central to the event.

"[The theme] is really trying to embrace a holistic view of what the diaspora means, and be very inclusive of all the different branches of the diaspora that are represented here at Tufts in our community,” he said.

Senior Bryce Turner, captain of BlackOut and an e-board member of the Africana Center's Black Men's Group, said the festival is part of the Africana Center's resurgence effort to be more involved with black affinity groups on campus, and an opportunity for the groups to be more involved with the student population as a whole.

"[We're also] working more to form alliances between groups [and] between organizations so that we don’t have any redundancies and can continue to support each other as we grow and expand and stay true to our missions as individual groups,” Turner said.

According to Katrina Moore, director of the Africana Center, the event will ideally help engage students, particularly first-years, at Tufts.

"We wanted to have this visible way for us to celebrate the different cultures and the different talents that are encompassed in the Africana community,” Moore said.

Moore added that the Center, working with the Africana Advisory Alliance, decided to try this new approach in order to achieve various goals.

“One [goal is] to have this festival that is highlighting the many talents of the students of African descent on campus, and to not only just introduce this community to the first-years but also to the greater Tufts community," she said.

The festival is being widely promoted to heighten the presence of the Africana Center on campus, according to Moore.

“We are not only trying to be sure that students in the community know about the center...but also [that] the greater Tufts community does as well," Moore said.

She explained that the Africana Center has been on the Tufts campus since 1969.

"We are trying to also honor all of the hard work [of] the students who fought to have a center like this exist…and to continue to provide opportunity for the students to celebrate their talents," Moore said. "They are here for academic purposes, but they are some unbelievably talented students as well."

According to Williams, the Center is hoping for a turnout of 200 to 300 people. The event, which will be held from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., is free.