The programme included theatre plays, dance, film screenings and exhibitions, all launched by a major conference. The event was to become one of the key moments in the staging of ‘Négritude’, a literary and political movement developed by the Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor in the 1930s and 40s.

Rather than taking a documentary approach, the exhibition focuses on the visual representations and evidence produced to capture or exploit this event. What emerges is a reflection on the cultural and political issues invested in an event that marked the outlook of Pan-Africanism at the time of the Cold War.