Africa Day: Rooted at Aviva Studios

Africa Day: Rooted doesn’t arrive with a single story. The African continent doesn’t have one, and neither does Manchester’s African diaspora.

Africa Day marks the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963 – a moment of collective assertion built on the recognition that Africa was not one thing, but many things that could nonetheless act together. That tension between plurality and solidarity gives the date its meaning, and it gives this free, family day at Aviva Studios its shape.

Rather than offering a unified portrait of African culture, the programme curated by FUZIA – the performance and collaborative arts project of percussionist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Emma Marsh – moves between traditions that have almost nothing in common except the breadth of the continent they draw from.

Gnawa Manchester open proceedings in the Undercroft with traditional trance music from Morocco: a form with roots in the forced displacement of West Africans to North Africa, preserved through centuries of oral tradition, and still tied to healing ceremony and collective spiritual practice. Elsewhere, Joy Ogboko leads an Amapiano dance workshop alongside DJ Lashimba – South Africa’s defining contemporary sound, built around log drum and hypnotic, cycling rhythms.

Mara Cruz brings Angolan music fusion; ReneeStormz delivers live rap. Global Grooves, the Tameside-based carnival arts organisation that has been developing world carnival traditions with Greater Manchester communities since 2003, weaves through the day with puppet walkabouts and visual installations.

What holds this together isn’t genre or geography but practice. Flag-making, crafts, dancing: the emphasis is participatory rather than presentational. The day closes with a ‘Homecoming’ finale featuring FUZIA’s 50-piece drum troupe – many traditions, arriving together, making an enormous amount of noise. Free to attend, no booking required.