Afribembé Festival 2024 is the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute’s (CCCADI’s) late summer festival.
Afribembé Festival 2024 Rhythms of Home
Pan-African Street Fair
The CCCADI Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute’s Afribembé Festival presents Something Positive Dance Troupe, Kongo-Haitian Roots Music, KR3TS dance company, Haitian DJ Sabine Blaizin, with MC Felipe Luciano (Former Young Lord); as part of Harlem Week’s “A Great Day in Harlem” celebration at Grant’s Tomb in Morningside Heights, Manhattan; on Sunday, August 11, 2024, from 4:30-6:30pm. FREE. cccadi.org 🇭🇹 🇵🇷
- Something Positive is an African Diasporic arts education organization. @somethingpositiveinc
- Kongo HaitianRoots is a Haitian roots music group in Brooklyn. Facebook @kongo.haitianroots
- KR3TS (Keep Rising to the Top) is a community dance organization. @kr3ts
- Felipe Luciano is a poet who was a Young Lord. @felipejluciano
The theme “Rhythms of Home” ties into CCCADI’s 2024 theme “Lakay se Lakey” (Home is Home in Haitian Kreyol).
In one of life’s strange coincidences, this year’s festival happens to fall on the Cuban day of Yewá, the Yoruba orisha of the cemetery who dances with the dead to help them move on. We know her from Cuban Yoruba Lucumí tradition, but she comes from Vodou which is Beninese, Haitian, Cuban Palo, and New Orleanian.
August 11 also happens to be hip hop’s birthday, the day of the first hip hop party organized by Cindy Campbell with her brother Clive Campbell (DJ Kool Herc) at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in The Bronx.
Afribembé Festival
The Afribembé Festival began in 2019. CCCADI’s Festival is a legacy of El Festival de Santiago Apóstol en El Barrio, founded by Aida Perez and Los Hermanos Fraternos de Loíza. It was New York City’s version of Las Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza Aldea, Loíza, which is Puerto Rico’s most beautiful fiesta patronales (patron saint festival).
Loíza Aldea is the Puerto Rican town with the strongest African Diasporic culture. It has been a town of Free Africans since Spanish colonial times. The Spaniards allowed free Africans to settle on the other side of the Lóiza River from Carolina (Metro San Juan). Today Loíza is the home of Puerto Rico’s most important batey or sacred dance circle (batey in the Puerto Rican sense, not the Dominican sense). Puerto Rican bomba culture has many centers around the island, but Loíza is the most important one. It’s the home of the Ayala Family, one of the leading families of Bomba Puertorriqueña.
Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol 2021
Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol 2019
Bembé Has Many Meanings
In the strictest sense, bembé is a religious ceremony for the Yoruba orishas. Most human culture originates in religious ceremony. But a bembé can also be just a party.
There is a Bembe people and language in Central Africa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and western Tanzania.
The Bembé drum is a two-headed Yoruba drum used in African, Cuban, and Trinidadian music. It looks to my eye like the Dominican tambora that is used in merengue and most Dominican music. The Dominican tambora is played with a curved stick and an open hand, just like Yoruba talking drums.
It is also a rhythm. In the video Bobby Sanabria explains the bembé rhythm for Latin Percussion.