Introduction to the 27th Edition of the Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF)
The 27th edition of the Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF), themed ‘Change: Imagining Alternatives,’ is set to begin tomorrow. The festival will take place across two venues: Freedom Park, located on Hospital Road, Lagos Island, and the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History in Onikan. As a flagship initiative of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), LABAF continues its long-standing mission of promoting literacy and cultural engagement through the arts.
Programme Highlights and Themes
Programme Chair of CORA and festival director, Jahman Anikulapo, has revealed that the event, which will conclude next Sunday, will feature 62 activities. These include conversations, networking sessions, workshops, mentorships, and a children’s festival. Anikulapo explained the theme’s choice in a statement, emphasizing the need to encourage new processes to transform society into a productive, knowledge-based economy as the country progresses through the second quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy.
He highlighted that the 62-programme of events during the festival aims to showcase several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world. This includes addressing issues such as herders’ killings, Boko Haram sit-ins, and other challenges that unsettle the nation. Anikulapo posed a critical question: “Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities?” The festival will spotlight novels, non-fiction narratives, and dramas where hope, perseverance, and the will to win are key themes.
Focus on Literacy and Cultural Engagement
Anikulapo emphasized that the focus of the festival remains on a literacy campaign through the instrumentality of the arts in all its dimensions. The 62 events held over the one-week duration of the festival will be devoted to using various disciplines of the arts—literature, visual, performing, media arts, etc.—to deepen CORA’s founding objective of educating, enlightening, and empowering (the 3Es) the citizenry to participate in the process of nation building.
The ultimate aim of the festival is to explore the artistic and cultural resources of the nation to help develop its human capital resources for the benefit of the entire society. Anikulapo, a frontline culture journalist and activist, further explained that LABAF remains an open-air, free programme that attracts no gate fees or financial commitment to participants in all the events except for vendors with merchandise.
This approach is designed to ensure that LABAF serves as CORA’s contribution to the spread of literacy, aiming to boost the capacity of the human resources of the nation and by extension the African continent, to grow its economic potentialities.
Partnerships and Collaborations
Over the past 27 years, partner organizations have remained the pillars of the festival’s sustenance, survival, and success. Freedom Park is the lead partner, closely followed by Children and the Environment (CATE), which stages the Green Festival—the children-adolescents segment. Events by Nature has anchored the CORA Youth Creative Club for the past decade. The two-year-old CORA BookTrekkers serve as the anchors of the youth literary segment.
Additional partners include associations in the literary and art disciplines, such as the Association of Nigerian Authors, Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN), the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists, the Society of Nigerian Artists, and the Pan-African Writers Association, among others. Some individual artists have become part of the DNA of the festival programming content, including the well-travelled performance artist, Jelili Atiku, and the management of the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History.
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