New Orleans, LA – From July 4-6, 2025, the annual Essence Festival of Culture commenced, and Black Power 96 (BP96) Radio was onsite with press credentials via BP96 Promotions Manager and co-host of the One Africa Worldview podcast, Dr. Mariah Bond and BP96 volunteer and photographer Talmadge Wells.
Hailed as a celebration of “Black American” culture, the Coca Cola-sponsored event featured panel discussions, performances and workshops that, at most, fostered a certain pride and appreciation of and for our African identity. Dr. Mariah and Talmadge were able to interview festival attendees and artists on the importance of Black Power 96, receiving words of encouragement and support, highlighting the significance of our presence there.
However, the event and the fallout from it strongly urges us as African Internationalists to assume the responsibility for the expression of African culture towards a revolutionary agenda.
Essence Fest criticized for “being too African”
While we have many criticisms of gatherings like the Essence Festival, of which we’ll get into later in this article, one we do not share is the idea that the event was “too African.”
A social media user on TikTok, Rob Smith, spouted this about the event:
“Essence Fest used to be a celebration of Black American culture—the culture that is ours, the culture that we built from the ground up, the culture in Black Americans influenced the world through has now been co-opted by a bunch of Africans. A bunch of Black Americans are not feeling it. Africans don’t set culture for this world, we do. Until Essence Fest gets back to the Black Americans who created it, and founded it, and lead the culture, it will continue to fail with those Africans in charge.”
With the unity of African people long called for by forces like Marcus Garvey in the early 1900s steadily on the rise, we see new characterizations of Africans born in the U.S. emerging, such as “American Descendants of Slaves” (ADOS) or “Foundational Black Americans” (FBA). They’ve graduated from calling themselves Negroes or coloreds as a means of distinguishing themselves from our dispersed African Nation. They’ve defined African people not born in the U.S. as “tethers.”
The Essence Fest, while carrying different motivations and independent of the consciousness of the organizers, leaned into an international expression of African culture because leaders like Garvey and Chairman Omali Yeshitela have pushed for the understanding that we are one African people. This is the popular understanding among Africans at home and abroad, which was what Essence Fest was responding to.
As the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and as African Internationalists, we vehemently oppose these backwards ideas that suggest Africans in the U.S. are different or superior to our Brothers and Sisters on the Continent and elsewhere; that cultural expression by Africans in the U.S. is somehow separated from African culture that has been exported by way of the slave trade, or that Africans in the U.S. are the claimants to Indigenous land.
We are one African people, period
This is a relatively recent and divisive politic seen among a small, yet loud sector of Africans born in the U.S. that has gained traction over the last decade, which is within the same period of rising African resistance seen within the borders of the U.S. and around the world.
The timing of its insidious development suggests that the colonial State is behind the ADOS/FBA trend. This ideological assault became prominent surrounding discussions of reparations to African people in the U.S. The ADOS trend declares that reparations are only owed to black people within the borders of the U.S.
It’s important to note that the reparations demand was popularized through the leadership of Chairman Omali Yeshitela and the APSP. The same ADOS group that claims reparations are only owed to black people born inside the U.S. couldn’t even have this discussion about reparations had it not been for the First World Tribunal on Reparations to African People organized by our Party in Brooklyn, NY in 1982.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela quantified what was owed to African people in stolen labor alone! He deepened our understanding of the true consequences of slavery and colonialism by calling on us to consider all Africa has produced for the world under the colonial mode of production: Africa’s natural resources that power the homes and cellphones of the U.S. and Europe, the labor and genius of Africa’s daughters and sons.
The culture we’ve produced in the land we were forcibly brought to is an extension of Africa. The instruments, the rhythm, the fashion and food, we’ve replicated from Ghana to the Caribbean. And had it not been for the slave trade, there would be no Blues or Spirituals within U.S. borders. No one is stealing “Black American” culture. Black cultural expression exists in America because of our relationship to Africa! How can Africa, the source of civilization and the homeland of black people, be a tether to anything?
No matter how you slice it, no matter how much one attempts to reject it, the time we’ve spent in foreign lands against our will does not change who we are: African people. Like Chairman Omali Yeshitela asserts, “We were Africans when we got on the ship. We were Africans when we got off the ship. Unless it was a magical ship, nothing happened along the way to change this.”
We need an Uhuru (Freedom) Fest!
The Essence Festival, for all its black culture celebration, doesn’t make an attempt to take on the absurd criticisms and claims coming from the ADOS/FBA trend. It doesn’t have the political leadership to do so. Propped up were petty bourgeois celebrities and politicians, no representation of the African working class, no platform to discuss the issues we face under colonialism.
This is because the festival is a production of the petty bourgeoisie, funded by ruling colonial-capitalists. They are responding to profit-making needs, not our needs for dignity, freedom and self-determination.
As revolutionaries, as organizers, as African people struggling to survive under a violent, oppressive social system, we have to raise the question of the festival and of ADOS: to-what-end? Where is the festival aiming to take our people? To plan for next year’s event? What is the end goal for ADOS? Why should any African follow them? What is their program, their organization? It’s clear that improving colonialism rather than destroying it is high on their list.
volunteer Talmadge Wells at Essence Festival 2025.
Chairman Omali Yeshitela has called out how everyone has an Africa plan, and for a while African people have not had a plan of our own. Garvey had a plan and colonial powers attacked it. Kwame Nkrumah had a plan, and they poisoned him. The APSP has our plan, and we’ve been actively working on it since our founding.
The U.S., Europe, Russia and China see Africa as the future, and so are scrambling for it. The colonizer benefits from black people rejecting their own land and resources. If they’ve convinced black people to hate Africa so much that we willingly change our identity to gain closeness with the settler-colonies over what rightfully belongs to us, their domination goes unchallenged. This is why we must question the development of ideologies like ADOS/FBA.
Organizing our own cultural production, which celebrates leaders like Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Garvey and Nkrumah, upholds revolutionary soldiers and cultural workers, promotes Buy Black Power institutions, provides platforms for discussions about how to get organized, bringing in Africans from around the world, this is what we must work to achieve.
Salute to Dr. Mariah and Talmadge for representing the Uhuru Movement by way of Black Power 96 Radio!
