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Acquisition

Official FESTAC ’77 souvenir added to the archive

The substantial 152-page publication preserves the festival’s public image and the institutional ambition required to make a vast event portable.

The archive has added FESTAC ’77: A Souvenir of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, published in Lagos in 1977 and printed by the Daily Times of Nigeria.

The 152-page illustrated publication records the festival through official framing, essays, photographs and the visual organisation of performances, objects and participants. Its scale demonstrates an administration capable of converting a dispersed cultural event into a durable documentary object.

Within the archive, the volume is read as evidence of institutional capacity rather than simply as a festival souvenir. Its public image must be placed beside more specialised records capable of recovering the intellectual, educational and administrative work that a commemorative publication necessarily condenses.