Opening the Final Symposium

Good morning, and welcome to the third and final symposium of the Global Freedom Festival — the Symposium on Afrikan Spirituality.

Our festival launched on April 14, coinciding with the start of the Season of Emancipation in Barbados, and it will close just ahead of Emancipation Day on August 1. Emancipated, of course, is simply another word for freedom. The work of this festival is also a form of self-reparations — a work of self-repair.

Over the past three months, this festival has moved through a single, connected inquiry into what it means to be free. In April, Movement 1 gathered us around Leadership and Freedom — the philosophies and strategies of liberation. In June, Movement 2 turned to Indigenous Knowledge — the living wisdom carried in our plants, our practices, and our land. Today, in Movement 3, we arrive at the ground beneath both: Afrikan Spirituality — the ancestral source from which our freedom, our knowledge, and our identity flow.

This Afrikan Spirituality symposium is about more than mere belief. It is a symposium about ways of knowing, technologies of healing and divination, and the continuing struggle for the freedom to practise what our ancestors left us. We are honoured by the elders, priests, scholars, and practitioners who have travelled from across Africa and the Caribbean to lead us through these three days.

Our programme moves from the West African spiritual traditions of the continent, through their life and transformation in the Caribbean, to the contemporary challenges we face together — and the solutions we might build.

Welcome. Let us begin.