Panafest / Emancipation

Panafest/Emancipation Per Person Cost: $1,798

The Pan African Historical Theatre Project now known as PANAFEST is a cultural event held in Ghana biennially for Africans and those of African descent. First held in 1992, PANAFEST was created to promote and enhance unity, Pan-Africanism, and the development of the African continent. Activities that occur at the festival include performances and works in the areas of theatre, drama, dance, music, and poetry. Also, there are viewings of the durbar of chiefs, and tours to various places of interest, such as slave castle dungeons.

PANAFEST was initiated by the late Efua Sutherland in the mid-1980s as a cultural vehicle for bringing Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora together around issues raised by slavery and its afterlife. PANAFEST addresses the traumatic rupture that occurred in the natural evolution of African societies which among other traumas profoundly eroded the self-confidence and freedom for self-determination of Africans and people of African descent. Ghana’s coastline is dotted with large, now silent memorials to over 400 years of this most turbulent period in African history. The festival determinedly makes use of these sites to confront the effects of enslavement, the diasporic yearning for home, and the aftereffects of “The Trade” on the Continent.