The 8th annual Afribembé festival celebrates CCCADI’s 50th anniversary and closes Harlem Week with Pan-African ancestral drum, song, and dance traditions on Harlem Day, Sun, August 16, 2026. Free
8th Afribembé Festival NYC 2026: Under One Sun
Pan-African festival with live music, dance, and an opening procession celebrating African diasporic traditions from Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Caribbean, presented by CCCADI
Children’s Village
Howard Bennett Park
Sun, August 16, 2026 | 12-5pm
Opening Procession: Los Pleneros de la 21 and Danza Fiesta
Harlem Day Main Stage Performances: Pan Evolution Steel Orchestra, Kofago Dance Ensemble
West 135th St between St. Nicholas and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd
Sun, August 16, 2026 | 7pm-8pm
Free
The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) closes out Harlem Day with its 8th annual Afribembé festival, and this edition carries extra weight. Titled Afribembé: Under One Sun, the 2026 festival lands during CCCADI’s 50th anniversary year, folding five decades of cultural stewardship into one evening on the Harlem Day Main Stage.
The African Diaspora is the world’s largest diaspora, but around the world we all live under the same sun. CCCADI has been using the phrase “Under One Sun” since the 1980s to describe the unity of the African Diaspora.
An opening procession led by Los Pleneros de la 21 and Danza Fiesta sets the tone, channeling the Afro-Puerto Rican traditions of bomba and plena alongside Danza Fiesta’s Carnival characters, the vejigantes and cabezudos. Editor Kíko: Used to do a similar procession with the Cepeda family, the first family of bomba, in Villa Palmeras, Santurce. It’s really fun.
From there, Pan Evolution Steel Orchestra (Trinidadian roots) and Kofago Dance Ensemble (Senegalese and Malian roots) take the stage from 7pm to 8pm, pairing Trinidadian steelpan artistry with West African-rooted movement drawn from the Senegambia region. Broadcast journalist and bomba and plena practitioner Viannca Vélez hosts the evening.
Beyond the main stage, festival goers can browse CCCADI’s Ọjà Marketplace, pick up giveaways, and explore archival materials from the Community Archiving Lab for Culture and Justice.
Just across the street, the Afribembé Children’s Village runs from 12pm to 5pm at Howard Bennett Park with face painting, storytelling, Carnival headpiece making, and games for younger visitors.
Afribembé arrives during Harlem Week’s 52nd year, themed “Honoring Our Legacy,” marking the third consecutive year the festival has partnered with Harlem Week for Harlem Day. The full event is free, with no registration required.
Bembé
The festival’s name fuses “Afri,” for Africa, with “Bembé,” a word used across the Diaspora for gatherings built on rhythm, connection, and celebration.
Bembé originally meant a Yoruba religious gathering, a storytelling, drum, song, and dance tradition. In the old ways, faith is much more present in everyday life.
Today bembé generally means a party, but the religious undercurrent may still be there, if you’ve been taught to see it.
There is a bembé rhythm in some African and Cuban music traditions. There is also a Bembe people and language in central Africa.
NYC’s Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol
Afribembé traces its lineage to El Festival de Santiago Apóstol en El Barrio, the Loíza Festival that brought Afro-Puerto Rican heritage to East Harlem for over 50 years before inspiring CCCADI’s own celebration of the wider African Diaspora.
Loíza Aldea is the Puerto Rican town where African Diasporic traditions remain the strongest. It was built by free Africans, and today is one of the most important centers of bomba Puertorriqueña on the island. You can hear bomba drums for miles, especially on the island. We have no idea how bomba survived 500 years in secret, at home, but it did. And it still lives on the island and in the Diaspora.
Santiago Apóstol in Loíza Aldea is our favorite fiesta patronales (patron saint festival) in Puerto Rico. In colonial times, African Diasporic traditions where not allowed, so the people hid their own traditions in the safest place, Spain’s own patron saint festival. They weren’t actually celebrating the colonizers, they were celebrating Orisha Ogun who keeps the road open with his machete.
A Spiritual Flash
Iroko “Kíko” Keith – Writing this is illuminating a personal spiritual moment. Your spiritual connections are always there, but you don’t always see them. I’m not initiated, but some African Diasporic traditions resonate in me, though I have no idea why. This is just my story. For religious education, ask the CCCADI.
The Orishas began revealing themselves to me years ago on my way to Puerto Rico, during my last day in New York. They called me through the drum of the world’s first call rumbero, an African Queen, and a Cuban actress who became my mentor. The more I understand the Orishas, the more I see them in my life.
La Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza Aldea was the first festival I saw in Puerto Rico. It was one of those days I’ll never forget. We ate delicious jueyes (land crabs), a speciality of the Loíza women. I have the carnival beads that Yemayá threw to me, in my office ofrenda. The beautiful faces of Loíza children in their carnival costumes looking at me like I just stepped out of a flying saucer, sticks in my mind. They were wearing golden yellow.
I saw my first bomba in Loíza’s Batey de los Hermanos Ayala, the most sacred dance circle in Puerto Rico. What good fortune. Later I spent some time with the Cepeda family in Santurce, and studied bomba with Calle 13’s percussionist Héctor “Coco” Barez. His bomba crew kept me human during the pandemic, and something in the drum changed me forever.
As protection against bad love, I named my barril (bomba drum) Oshún, for the Orisha of fresh water, fertility, love, beauty, and wealth. Oshún’s color is golden yellow.
I later moved to the Dominican Republic, and ended up in Santiago de los Caballeros, the DR’s second city whose color is golden yellow, whose patron saint is Santiago Apóstol, and whose 21 Divisiones misterio is Ogun Balenyo. There’s Oshún’s golden yellow, and Ogun, the African force of nature syncretized with Santiago Apóstol.
I have a friend whose long beautifully rounded face and high hairline reminded me of the famous sculpture of the first Queen of the 16th century Benin Empire. You can see it in the Met Museum. So I named my friend Oshún.
When I took my friend Oshún for a beach weekend, she introduced me to the taxidriver Miguel. Later when someone said there was a palo for San Miguel, I thought it would be like a Puerto Rican bombazo, and went looking for it.
I couldn’t find a palo because these things are hidden in the DR, but taxidriver Miguel took me to a bruja in the barrio who turned her back room into an altar for San Miguel. I recognized many saints there, including Mami Wata (Marta la Dominadora). The bruja had a bottle of what I thought was perfume. She asked if I wanted a spray. When trying new things, I go for it, so I said yes. In hindsight, I think the bruja baptized me in San Miguel.
Because a week later, I asked taxidriver Miguel to bring some friends and lets go dancing. It was fun, but they were too wild for me, the kind of love from which I sought Oshún’s protection. Maybe that was a test because the next morning Miguel suggested I go out again. I didn’t want to go out because I had to go to New York the next day, but he insisted. He invited a friend who also didn’t want to go out, but Miguel insisted to her too.
So I went and fell in love at first sight (something I don’t do) with an Afro-Indigenous, Dominican Taína. In her pajon (natural curly hair), she looks just like the famous image of Mami Wata.
I fell really hard, but through her and her children who lived with me, I learned a little about Afro-Latina women, Caribbean families, and the struggles of the poor, a level of poor most New Yorkers never see. You can’t learn this from a book, you only learn this from life. Ay bendito.
Somehow, NYC, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Loíza Aldea, Santiago Apóstol (Ogún), and my bomba barril Oshún, with the help of my friend Oshún, taxidriver Miguel, and San Miguel, got me to fall in love with Mami Wata and her children, in Santiago de los Caballeros, a city protected by Ogun Balenyo (Santiago Apóstol). That is crazy.
Maybe it’s all in my head, but there are a lot of connections here. It’s like a movie. The way I see it, naming my bomba barril Oshún really did protect me from bad love. ¡Aché!