African Festival Delft
Betsy and I spent the evening at the African Festival Delft, a yearly festival that has seen more then 20 editions. And indeed, I recognize the festival’s logo as something from my early youth, coming to Delft when I was only 4.
The day I spent at a conference, related to the festival. One of the subjects was going to deal with how to involve the African diaspora in development projects. And since I’ve just returned from Zimbabwe and spent three months in Ghana in 2001, I was mildly interested. Of course, the free meals and the free ticket to the evening’s shows helped too.
Quickly after the conference began, I realised I had to be somewhere else. Indeed, the conference felt very African: We started 30 minutes late; Just after we began, an African was offering pencils from the doorway, making suggestive moves with his head, as if he was actually selling them on the streets of any African city; One of the speakers kept on repeating he wants to ‘zoom in on this’ and another speaker broke the world record for repeating the word ‘remittance’ 57 times in what felt like 10 seconds.
After the morning’s introductions, I had a (very good) lunch, went home, came back for the day’s conclusion, had a reasonable dinner, where I ate half a VERY hot pepper in one go, cried, enjoyed a bit of the show, where one band decided not to show up, and went home.