Africa Day parade to kick off in New York City
By SSI staff writer
NEW YORK, USA- The annual celebrations of bringing Africans together under the theme “Africa Day” kicks off this coming Sunday in the uptown neighborhood of Harlem.
In an exclusive interview with the organizers, SSI has informed the 2nd annual event Street Festival will be at its best and will take place on Sunday, August 24 2008 and will be a unique opportunity for the African Community and other communities to showcase their products and celebrate their cultures and traditions.
Mamadou Kone, founder of the Africa Day Parade told the SSI that the event is poised to become one of the most diverse African cultural events to take place in New York City. The Parade brings together performing artists and cultural groups representing Central, North, South, East, and West Africa.
“The breadth of the work extends from musical performances to fashion, design, art, folklore, dance, and live bands”, said Mamadou.
The African Day Parade is the brainchild of young African professionals from diverse backgrounds. These organizers saw not only what they called ‘a lack of representation on stages from the countries that comprise Africa’ but also ‘an absence of African culture in American festivals and cultural productions as a whole’. It is intended that in the coming years, the Parade will become a forum for participating groups to share history and culture.
Ammadou told SSI that the initiative started in 2005 with discussions on looking at how to bring Africans together in a parade form so that they can celebrate. “Of course before this, there were similar initiatives on smaller scales, but those ones did not bring all Africans together. One of the main reasons for us to plan this parade is that other nationalities from other continents in the US come together to show case their traditions and cultures. But Africa has multi cultures, that are beautiful, and we could also showcase these traditional cultures” Ammadou said.
“Here in the US, Africans, are highly divided in gathering for instance, the Ghanaians gather together to do their own celebrations, the Senegalese do their own, the Kenyans do their own and there is nothing like coming together as Africans and celebrating the wealth of cultures and traditions together. So we said it is time to take this, because if the Latinos can do that we should also be able to do it”, explained Ammadou.
Discussing about the start of the parade, Amadou said, the process of putting together a plan and after studying, assessing the community took long but finally it was made possible to do the parade in 2007. The reason for the delay was in the process in the first place our initiative has to deal with different nationalities of African nations who happen to have different cultures and traditions; therefore we had to study this and consider the way they would want the parade happen. .
“Africa is rich in culture, it has colorful cultures, here in the US we have seen so much of division among African community, for instance, Senegalese would do their own, Kenyans will do their own, and Ghanaians will do their own celebrations. There is no coming together, we should come together as united and elaborate our cultures”, the organizers said.
The founder told SSI that they had applied to the NYPD for the parade at the end of 2006 but their application was denied. The reason for declining for the application was that NYPD assumed that there is a similar parade that takes place every year known to them as the African American day parade.
“But we as Africans believe that African Americans are our brothers we are part and parcel to each other, but the African day parade is more inclusive in that it first objective is to bring all black cultures together because the source of black culture is Africa. So we told to the NYPD that it is not the same parade for the simple reason that this is a parade of a race or particular community centered, it is rather an umbrella parade for all parades that are done by blacks of the US, Caribbean, etc. We had to hire a lawyer to get our argument through and this took about four months. We even went to the extent of planning to take it to the Supreme Court, because this is an issue of rights”, Ammadou added.
“After several round of persuasion, the NYPD allowed the parade to take place and the authorization was issued on August 5th, 2007, and the parade was slated for August 22nd, so we had only three weeks to prepare. This was a challenge, to bring the Africans who live dispersed in their communities and are busy pushing hard to make a living would be hard”, he said.
This year’s parade hope to bring close to 20,000 people to celebrate the second annual African day parade. The chairperson of the parade is Madam. Massida Dione who supports the group and put together the finances.
Many different nationalities from different countries, for instance, to list the few, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Senegal, South Africa, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Uganda including Jamaicans. Others like Nigerians, Ghanaians, Cape Verdeans, Namibians, Ethiopians, Burundians, Ugandans, Senegalese and Mauritanians are also expected to come on board.
“So I could say Africa was well represented and our plan to bring more Africans and also friends if Africa this year. This year we expect to have the North African participants” said Kone. The group also extended invitations and calling upon the Caribbean brothers and they told SSI that they also agreed to come and participate.