The Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF) has announced a significant coup for this year’s edition. Professor Akin Adesokan, a distinguished scholar of Comparative Literature and Cinema, and Media Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, United States, has been selected to deliver the keynote address at the festival’s colloquium.
Scheduled for Friday, November 15, Adesokan’s appearance marks a notable return to LABAF after an 11-year hiatus. The multi-talented academic, known for his award-winning novel Roots in The Sky and his recent English translation of Chief Isaac Delanọ’s Yoruba novel Aiyé D’aiyé Òyìnbó (The Age of White Rulers), is set to bring his wealth of literary and cultural expertise to the event. His presence is expected to be a highlight of the festival, which has been dubbed “the country’s biggest culture picnic” and will run from November 11 to 17 at Freedom Park, Lagos Island.
Also notable as an essayist (“Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics, Everything is Sampled”), the working title of Adesokan’s paper is “The Pitfalls of Memory from Hope to Despair and Reckoning”.
It will focus on Wọle Ṣoyinka’s Nobel lecture, “This Past Must Address Its Present” and the 2003 documentary film, The Return of Sara Baartman (by South African director Zola Maseko) about the repatriation of the remains of Sara Baartman, so-called “Hottentot Venus,” to South Africa in 1998.
AdesokanAdesokan was at the LABAF in 2013, to moderate a conversation with John Godwin, the architecture professor and passionate advocate of historical preservation in the city of Lagos and his wife Gillian Hopwood, who had just (then) jointly authored a book: Sandbank City: 150 Years of Lagos. The discussion was in keeping with the theme of the LABAF 2013: “Nigeria’s Centenary, The Lagos Narrative”.
LABAF 2024, with the theme, “Breakout: Hope is a stubborn thing,” will focus on the main books of the festival on the three weekend days of Friday, November 15 to Sunday, November 17.
The colloquium is the major plenary assembly of the LABAF.
Previous keynoters, in the last 10 editions of this annual homage to literacy, have included Professors Biodun Jeyifo, Niyi Osundare, and Awam Amkpa. The poet Odia Ofeimun has been a keynoter, as has Ayisha Osori, author of Love Does Not Win Elections.
Kunle Ajibade, the activist journalist who delivered the Festival keynote in 2021, will chair Adesokan’s address.
“Adesokan’s keynote will engage with the main thematic concerns that unify the 12 main books of the Festival”, says Jahman Anikulapo, Programme Chair of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), which is hosting the event
The keynote address will be followed by a panel with the subtheme: Reclaiming the Moment, featuring reviews and conversations around Ayi Kwei Armah’s wat nt shemsw: The Way of Companions and Mark Manson: Everything F*cked: A Book about Hope. The reviewers and discussants on this colloquium panel include Deji Toye, a poet and lawyer and Dipo Ogunbiyi, an investment banker. The panel will be moderated by Ifeanyi Uddin, banker and newspaper columnist at Premium Times
Anikulapo, a former Editor of The Guardian on Sunday and the curator and festival director of LABAF, explains the choice of the theme “Hope is a Stubborn Thing,” for the Festival. “In the difficult circumstances that our society finds itself, hope is the one sure compass with which we can navigate the waters. The event is dedicated to Professor Wole Soyinka, whose constancy is a source of hope and optimism.This festival will engage with books in which hope, doggedness, the will to win, is a key subject, whether in fiction or in reality”.
Here is a list of the main books of the Festival:
- Andre Brink’s Imaginings of Sand
- Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s We, The Scarred
- Mark Manson’s Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope
- Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2013),
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s wat nt shemsw:The Way of Companions (2018)
- Wọle Ṣoyinka’s Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
- Antje Krog’s A Change of Tongue
- Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim’s Parallels and Paradoxes: EXPLORATIONS IN MUSIC AND SOCIETY-This is about a possible Pluralism of Israeli and Palestinian societies
- Peter Zeihan’s The End of The World Is Just The Beginning
- Hans Rosling: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
- Chigozie Obioma’s ‘The Road to the Country’.
- Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa.
Please mark your calendars, LABAF 2024 dates are November 11-17, 2024. Venue: Freedom Park, Campbell Street, Lagos Island, Lagos State, Nigeria.
