Marilyn Nance, at right, the photographer and author of “Last Day in Lagos,” which was edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, below left, seen at Nance’s home in Brooklyn.Credit...Lelanie Foster for The New York Times

A Shining Moment of Pan-African Promise in a New Book

Marilyn Nance was 23 when she photographed FESTAC ’77, the immense gathering of Black artists in Nigeria. In ‘Last Day in Lagos,’ she shares her archive.

Marilyn Nance wasn’t going home just yet.

It was February 1977, in Lagos, Nigeria. Nance was 23, an emerging photographer from Brooklyn, freshly graduated from the Pratt Institute. Now, for her very first trip outside the United States, she was thrust into an epochal Pan-African cultural event, of an ambition and scale never attempted before — nor indeed ever since.

She had arrived on a charter flight with over 200 other Black American artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, scholars and cultural activists. They joined colleagues and peers from the African continent, the global diaspora and Indigenous Australians during the four weeks of FESTAC ’77 — the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture.

In all some 17,000 artists would gather in Lagos, exhibiting and performing in the National Theater complex constructed for the occasion, living in the newly built FESTAC Village. There were stars: Miriam Makeba, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra and his Arkestra. Among the American visual artists were Samella Lewis, Valerie Maynard, Melvin Edwards. But what Nance remembers best of all was effervescent exchange among scores of artists who are less known today.

To think across borders was in the spirit of the 1970s. In Black American culture, Pan-African currents rode high. “My politics took me to Nigeria,” Nance said recently. “I was clawing to get there.” Accepted into the U.S. delegation, then dropped due to costs, she heard the delegation needed technicians, and organizers at Howard University accepted her in that capacity.

After two weeks, Nance was expected to return home with the first wave of U.S. delegates. No way. She stayed at her own expense — and she kept her negatives.

Her new book, “Last Day in Lagos,” gathers over 100 of these images with essays by artists and curators. It is the first book for Nance, now 69, who maintained her photo practice all along even as she prioritized day jobs, first in advertising and then as a public-school educator.

Hers is the deepest individual image archive to have emerged from FESTAC ’77 — a major contribution on those grounds alone, but also a long-overdue focus on the early work of an important Black photographer who herself has only recently earned proper institutional notice. (Images from subsequent projects have appeared recently in the “Greater New York” exhibition at MoMA P.S. 1, and “The Dirty South,” organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.)

In Lagos, Nance brought her own cameras and film, and moved as she pleased. She hung out in FESTAC Village and joined excursions to meet Nigerian artists in other cities. She didn’t have a strategy for her images. But she was drawn to the edges, quiet moments, faces in the crowd — the festival as four weeks of daily life, not a succession of stage happenings.

FESTAC left a bittersweet trace in Nigeria, said Oluremi C. Onabanjo, a scholar of African photography and associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who edited “Last Day in Lagos” working closely with Nance.

Onabanjo was born after the event but heard about it from her Lagosian relatives. “Aunts and uncles would smile really big when they talked about FESTAC,” Onabanjo said. “It was a time when Lagos was full of people from around the world, amazing weeks of parties, a time when there was possibility.” The military regime in power spent lavishly to pull off the event. But all that new construction came with corruption, too, and many ordinary Nigerians resented the splashy expense in the face of more pressing needs.

After FESTAC, Nigeria’s claim to leadership in the Black world would fade. So would the 1970s energy of transnational political thought and cultural alliances. Today, with environmental and social crises at global scale, the world would benefit from renewing that internationalist spirit, says the artist Julie Mehretu in her foreword to “Last Day in Lagos” (published by Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, and Center for Art Research and Alliances, New York). The joy in these images, Mehretu writes, is a testament to what is possible — “euphorically and imaginatively.”

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Nigeria, FESTAC ’77.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This image of a Nigerian Navy sailor with a traditional dance troupe at the opening ceremony has become an icon of FESTAC ’77, circulating widely — usually without attribution. “It has floated around the world,” Nance said. But it only scratches the surface of the event, and her experience.

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FESTAC VillageCredit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Nance remembers trying to get her bearings the morning after arrival, housed in a new neighborhood whose construction was not yet complete. “Lagos was making room for people to come,” Onabanjo, the editor, said of this image. “We sense a palpable anticipation — both of the participants arriving, and of the city.”

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Sun Ra rehearsing in FESTAC Village.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

On her way to do laundry in the festival village, Nance came across Sun Ra Arkestra rehearsing (Sun Ra at keyboard, with Kamau Seitu of the Wajumbe Cultural Ensemble on drums). She hurried back to get her camera. “They rehearsed for hours,” she said. The image hints at the interaction between the band and local onlookers. “Anybody could just peep in. Some people came in and danced.”

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Miriam Makeba in Tafawa Balewa Square.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Fela Kuti at the Afrika Shrine, Lagos.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

FESTAC’s final concert was a star-studded affair with Stevie Wonder and Miriam Makeba headlining. Makeba, the South African singer, was a Pan-African icon — and glamorous. “She must have changed costume five times,” Nance said. Not shown is the crowd, tightly packed, and ebullient. “The atmosphere was thick.”

Fela Kuti, the great Afrobeat bandleader, stepped down from the Festac planning committee, critical of corrupt contracting and the military regime’s motives. He held counter-festival concerts at his club, the Afrika Shrine — which the FESTAC delegates massively attended. “He’s jubilant, he’s up high,” Onabanjo said of this shot. But the brutal military raid on Fela’s compound immediately after the festival, she said, would come to symbolize dashed political hopes of the 1970s.

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FESTAC ’77 closing ceremony: the Sierra Leonean contingent.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The modernist lines of the National Stadium and a traditional masked dancer from Sierra Leone organize this image; the scattered debris shows the mess that accumulates at a festival and that official photographs avoid. “I’m not making a spectacle of the mask, I’m just there,” Nance said. These images register her own presence — “my belonging-ness,” she recalled.

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Wajumbe Cultural Ensemble relaxing.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

FESTAC proved a meeting ground for the East Coast and West Coast wings of the Black Arts scene. Against the Black nationalist flag, people including members of the Wajumbe Cultural Ensemble, a dance troupe from Oakland, Calif. (including its director, Nontsizi Cayou, rear left; Dolores Curry, second from right; Mpho Ratliff, at far right) found repose. “There’s a languidness,” Onabanjo noted. “You know something good happened, and people are just chilling.”

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FESTAC Village workers.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Nance’s eye was drawn toward everyday Nigerians whose labor made FESTAC possible. Here, kitchen workers emerge from a festival village cafeteria. Onabanjo said that this image epitomizes a kind of intuitive lyricism that marks Nance’s style. “When I’m photographing, it’s a feeling,” Nance replied. “My finger touches the shutter on spirit.”

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Winnie Owens-Hart returns to Lagos from Benin City and Ilé-Ifè,Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

During their stay, Black American artists visited Benin City and Ilé-Ifè, Nigerian cities with rich cultural history. Nance made this image of a contemplative Winnie Owens-Hart, a ceramic artist, on the road back. “She must be in some kind of moment,” Nance said. Owens-Hart would return to West Africa frequently, and keeps close ties to its traditional ceramicists to this day.

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African American and Nigerian artists in Ilé-Ifè.Credit...Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Nance hopes her book is “a beginning of the research that needs to be done about this moment and this period of time.” Her images portray a world of Black artists who are underrecognized today. Left to right: Oghenero Akpomuje, Frank Smith, unidentified artist, Winnie Owens-Hart (with camera), David Stephens, Patricia Phipps, unidentified, Napoleon Jones-Henderson, Viola Burley, Tyrone Mitchell, Agbo Folarin (who hosted the group; holding child, Abiola Folarin), Charles Abramson. Kneeling: Bisi Fabunmi, Yinka Adeyemi, unidentified.

Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa and elsewhere. Previously he wrote regularly for The Village Voice and The Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio. More about Siddhartha Mitter

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Time of Possibility and Promise. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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