Two venues set to host 27th LABAF

THE 27th edition of the Lagos Book & Art Festival (LABAF), themed ‘Change: Imagining Alternatives,’ opens tomorrow across two venues, Freedom Park, Hospital Road, Lagos Island, and the J. Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, Onikan.

The festival, a flagship initiative of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), continues its long-standing mission of promoting literacy and cultural engagement through the arts.

Programme Chair of CORA and festival director, Jahman Anikulapo, disclosed that the event ending next Sunday will feature 62 activities, including conversations, networks, workshops, mentorships, and a children’s festival.

He also explained the theme’s choice in a statement. “Our subject, this year, is primarily inspired by the need to encourage new processes to transform our society into a productive, knowledge economy as we progress through the second quarter century of the world’s fourth largest democracy. The 62-programme of events during the festival hopes to show several points of light in a dark, pessimistic world, headlined by herders’ killings, Boko Haram sit-ins, and other convulsions in the polity that unsettle us all. Can we all, through books, imagine a world of better possibilities? LABAF 2025 will be spotlighting novels, non-fiction narratives and dramas in which hope, doggedness, and the will to win are key subjects.”

He added that “the focus of the festival remains literacy campaign through the instrumentality of the arts in all its dimensions, hence the 62 events that would be held in the course of the one-week duration of the festival will be devoted to using the various disciplines of the arts – literature, visual, performing, media arts, etc – to deepen CORA’s founding objective of educating, enlightening and consequently empowering (3Es) the citizenry to participate in the process of nation building.

“The ultimate aim is to explore the artistic and cultural resources of the nation to help develop its human capital resources for the benefit of the entire society.”

Anikulapo, a frontline culture journalist and activist further explained that LABAF remains “an open-air, free programme that attracts no gate fees or financial commitment to participants in all the events except to vendors with merchandises.  He explained that this is so because LABAF is “conceived as CORA’s contribution to the spread of literacy towards boosting the capacity of the human resources of the nation, and by extension the African continent, to grow its economic potentialities.”

Anikulapo further disclosed that partner organisations have remained the pillars of the festival’s sustenance, survival, and success over the past 27 years of its existence. 

Freedom Park is the lead partner, closely followed by Children and the Environment (CATE), which stages the Green Festival—the children-adolescents segment; and Events by Nature, which has anchored the CORA Youth Creative Club for the past decade. The two-year-old CORA BookTrekkers serve as the anchors of the youth literary segment.

Additional partners include associations in the literary and art disciplines, including the Association of Nigerian Authors, Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN), the National Association of Nigerian Theatre Arts Practitioners, the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artists, the Society of Nigerian Artists, and the Pan-African Writers Association, among others. Some individual artists have become part of the DNA of the festival programming content, including the well-travelled performance artist, Jelili Atiku, and the management of the JRandle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History.