Four-year-old music festival developing new links in effort to foster greater diaspora community
Shortly after Navel Sarr moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland six years ago, he began to realise that many of the people he met in the Black and African community in the city were often planning on leaving the island to live somewhere else.
Sarr often asked them, “Why do you want to leave Newfoundland?” And the answer was usually that the community was so small that there was simply nothing for them here. Intriguingly, Sarr had a very different vision.
Having lived previously in Saskatchewan and, for 10 years, in Montreal, Sarr had spent a great deal of time in the exact type of communities these Newfoundlanders talked about moving to some day, after graduation, for work, and so on.
But when Sarr looked around St. John’s, he thought the grass was no greener where he had come from. In Newfoundland, he says, “The [access to] nature is awesome, the people are nice.” He saw an opportunity to start a community from the ground up. “Because everything, it’s empty, we can build whatever we want, we can have whatever we want.”
Music was an obvious first step, so for four years now, Sarr and a team have put together the St. John’s African Roots Festival (SARFest), which also serves as a play on Sarr’s last name.
After a few difficult years during the pandemic, this year’s festival seemed to garner more attention online, in part because of some slick and engaging videos that highlighted a range of acts, from both local performers and performers from Montreal.
In part, Sarr is attempting to build a festival that does some outreach to the local, predominantly white, community in the capital city. “Newfoundlanders really really love the music. Africans, Black people too, they really love the music,” Sarr says. “Immigrants, when they come to Canada, we learn a lot of things,” he points out. “But the opposite is not true.”
So the idea is that a festival can bridge that gap. “We can start by having a music festival, bringing both communities together, to give them an opportunity to know each other,” Sarr says. “We have to know each other to have a good living, good communication.”
This year’s festival featured headliner Zale Seck, a charismatic Quebec-based singer, as well as a PhD student in ethnomusicology at Memorial University, and Andrew Kagumba, originally from central Uganda, who has a stunning voice to accompany a wide array of instruments. There were also performers in Afro dance and African drums, as well as Latin dance workshops.
“You can feel how people were smiling, the positive energy,” Sarr says. “It was like a boost. Sometimes we don’t have family here, you can feel lonely, and this kind of event can remind you of your family, your country.” Suddenly you might see “a musician singing your local language, in St. John’s, in Canada, and the feeling can be like ‘wow.’”
And yet, Sarr says, they started four years ago and noticed that music was not enough. So they began a film festival as well. They show films from different parts of Africa and America. “It’s not just for Black people; it’s anyone having connections with Africa,” Sarr says. It could be films with connections to North Africa, the Caribbean, almost anywhere.
The fact these festivals are up and running are proof Sarr’s work is paying off, and yet, he acknowledges there are significant barriers. He says attendance hasn’t been where he would like it to be, and the reasons aren’t completely clear.
“For me it’s not my festival, it’s everyone’s festival. We just want to see more African people coming to help themselves,” Sarr says. “If you come to this festival, you should see more Black people, but it’s not the case.”
It doesn’t help that for reasons Sarr can’t quite explain, SARFest was not allowed to bring in food trucks or other food vendors, something that is permitted for other festivals. He says a festival without food simply doesn’t work, because people are constantly having to leave to go eat.
The festival is free, in the peak summer season, outdoors in one of St. John’s most beautiful central parks. In years past it’s been in Holy Heart theatre, and maybe having the park as its new home could help the festival gain traction.
In any case, SARFest isn’t resting. It has ongoing collaborations with CB Nuit, the art festival in Corner Brook on the island’s west coast, as well as a showcase at the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival, which attracts large crowds each summer.
Sarr thinks back to Zale Seck’s set at this year’s festival. It was the first time Seck brought his entire group with him, Sarr says. “It was just crazy, the dancers, the attendees, it wasn’t the plan. You can see the attendees were on stage, dancing with him, it was just crazy.”
