PANAFEST 2023 is held under the theme "Re-Claiming the African Family: Confronting the Past to Face the Challenges of the 21st Century" from July 19 to August 1. The festival features Emancipation Day celebrations, lectures and discussions, musical, cultural and dance events, as well as commemorative visits to sites of slavery.
PANAFEST started with a Northern Pilgrimage along the slave route on July 19-23. Participants traveled from Ghana's capital city of Accra to the northern part of the country and back to the southern part to experience the historical slave routes that participants' ancestors went through before they were taken to the Cape Coast and Elmina Castles and transported across the Atlantic.
According to the festival program, the five-day tour included chiefs' durbars at the Pikworo slave camp in the Upper East Region, atonement ceremonies at the Salaga slave camp in the Northern Region, discussions on "truths about narratives of enslavement," and visits to other sites of remembrance along the route.
The event continued with wreath-laying ceremonies to pay tribute to the Pan-African pioneers at the W.E.B Du Bois Centre, George Padmore Library and the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park on Monday, July 24, in Accra.
In particular, on Wednesday, the PANAFEST Village/Bazaar and Expo opened as a permanent site for exhibition, sale of goods and performances.
The festival will culminate with the Emancipation Day celebrations on August 1. The day commemorates the formal abolition of slavery in the British Colonies in 1834. Its annual observance was introduced in Ghana in 1998.
The main celebration will take place in Assin Manso, where a solemn durbar of chiefs and people of the town, known for its role as a slave market, will be held. The event is intended "to give reverence to those ancestors who suffered the horrifying journey of the slave route and gave up their lives far away from their homeland."
The festival is organized every two years by the PANAFEST Foundation in collaboration with the Ghana Tourism Authority. The idea for such an event was proposed by playwright and Pan-Africanist Efua Sutherland in a paper entitled "Proposal for a Historical Drama Festival in Cape Coast". Since its inception in the early 1990s, the festival has grown into a multi-faceted cultural platform for a series of events including playwriting competitions, seminars and workshops on Pan-Africanism.