Let’s KILL African Liberation Day!!!
- May 26
- 4 min read
Let’s KILL African Liberation Day!!!
Pan-Africanism is happening — we just don’t always recognise the signs.
Today, Monday 25th May 2026, is African Liberation Day, now more commonly referred to as Africa Day. Across London, Birmingham and cities throughout the diaspora — stretching into Africa, the Caribbean and America — people will gather in the name of unity.
The struggle against the oppression of African nations and African people linked by history, land and heritage continues. The fight for politically self-governed, economically stable African nations — independent from Western dominance and extraction — is still very much alive. Which is exactly why African Liberation Day remains as necessary now as it was at its conception.
When the AU, the African Union, removed “Liberation” from the title in 2002, many committed Pan-Africanists refused to let it go. Because liberation is the point. Liberation is the demand.
Born from the minds of revolutionary leaders within the OAU — the Organisation of African Unity — African Liberation Day stands as both memory and instruction manual. We are still studying the teachings of those leaders now, still searching their words for guidance on how to truly unite and liberate Africa for African people.
I remember attending my first ALD in 2015. The following year I performed a poem on the state of UK politics, and the year after that I performed a piece honouring the warrior Queen Amanirenas.
I felt seen there. Heard.
The room was filled with like-minded souls and the presence of ancestral resistance. Families. Elders. Young people. Book stalls. Economic exchange. Political education. I remember seeing Akala there as a member of the AAPRP at the time. All of it fuelled something in me. The fire for Motherland Africa burned deeper.
But there were also warning signs. Small fractures appearing year after year. Threads of sustainability and structure fraying at the edges.
And it wasn’t just ALD. You could see it across different Pan-African spaces — the UNIA, IAPP, NOI gatherings. At some point during the day, a section of the village would gather in frustration: the venue, the turnout, the lack of marketing, the absence of long-term strategy, the missing economic infrastructure. The same conversations repeated themselves every year.
And the truth is — many of those criticisms were valid.
The crowds were shrinking. Liberation was ageing. Too many spaces became echo chambers, with only the occasionally “newly awakened” person arriving fresh from their own political red pill moment.
But Pan-Africanism is not dead. Far from it.
It is alive. Breathing. Functioning. Operational. What it lacks is cohesion — the central nervous system capable of connecting all the moving parts together.
Then came 2020, and for a moment, a window opened.
Ghana launched the Year of Return and welcomed thousands of us home. I was there as part of Voyage to Motherland, a documentary project travelling through Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria, documenting the beauty, complexity and possibility of African nations through our own lens.
Africa Day was broadcast globally, featuring artists including Idris Elba. But even then, the political message felt diluted.
After the murder of George Floyd — sacrificed publicly at the altar of racial power and state violence — corporations rushed to perform solidarity. Suddenly statements were everywhere. Diversity language became fashionable. But now, years later, we are watching many of those same systems reveal themselves again without shame: wars escalating, oppressive laws tightening, extraction continuing under new names.
Colonial ideology never truly left us. It simply adapted.
And African liberation remains essential because it asks us to unlearn the architecture of inferiority that empire built around us.
Which brings me to City Splash.
This year, City Splash falls on the exact same day as African Liberation Day, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the potential of us.
Thirty thousand people — maybe more — gathered together. A living map of the African diaspora in all its beauty. Jamaican, Ghanaian, Nigerian, Congolese, Somali, St Lucian, South African and beyond. Basslines shaking the ground. Melanated bodies moving freely through the city.
And yet ALD barely existed within the atmosphere.
Maybe a few artists mentioned Africa Day. Maybe I missed it. But standing there, I couldn’t help imagining what could happen if Pan-Africanism met spaces like this without shame, stiffness or nostalgia.
I imagined thousands of red, black and green flags moving through the crowd. Artists dedicating songs to the continent with conviction and pride. Not symbolism without substance, but cultural clarity. I imagined organisations like the AAPRP returning to the kind of visible public organising they mastered in the 90s — investing in tents and installations at major festivals. Creating moments of political education between headline acts. Poetry. Art. Radical imagination. Economic strategy.
I imagined artists like Fuse ODG headlining under unapologetic Pan-African themes.
Because what makes City Splash so powerful is that it already reflects the reality Pan-Africanism talks about: African people across nations gathering together naturally.
The unity already exists culturally. The politics just haven’t caught up yet.
And then I thought about economics.
What if 5% of festival proceeds went towards organisations like The Africa Centre or African-centred Saturday schools? What if liberation was resourced instead of endlessly discussed?
I imagined murals of Winnie Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah and Assata Shakur stretching across festival walls. Food stalls serving dishes from every corner of the continent. Palm wine and baobab juice flowing. Young people inspired not only to visit Africa, but to invest in it. To build with it. To understand that Africa is not simply somewhere we came from — it is central to all our futures.
Because Africa was never meant to exist merely as a site of extraction.
Can we build this? Absolutely. We can KILL African Liberation Day in terms of the metaphorical and colloquial fire we bring to it using the weapon of music and celebration to ignite the power of our unified strength.
And these are exactly the conversations we want to continue at our weekly gatherings at The Africa Centre through Poetic Temple. We believe one day “Africa Towns” will exist — intentional cultural and economic spaces built by us, for us. Places rooted in collective strength, creativity, ownership and long-term growth.
Tickets for this week’s Poetic Temple x Manya Bar activation are available via the link.
Tickets directly from us:
Peace written by
Stella B
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