PANAFEST is an event dedicated to the African dance, music and other performing arts. Also known as the 'Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival', Panfest is a cultural event that aims and endeavors towards the enhancement of the ideals of Pan-Africanism and the development of the African continent. It is a biennial festival and is observed every two years to celebrate the people of African descent as well as all persons committed to the well being of Africans on continent and in the global arena.

PANAFEST is founded on the premise that the arts, particularly theatre,  are powerful tools of communication and healing and that people need to create new expressions and commemorations and platforms for dialogue to provide the inspiration for mobilizing energies for moving on to greater heights.

The PAN African historical theatre project now known as  “Panafest” Festival was inspired by and takes its source from a paper written in the mid-1980s as a cultural vehicle for bringing Africans on the continent and in the diaspora together around the issues raised by slavery which remain prevalent.


The PANAFEST 1980 entitled “Proposal for a Historical Drama Festival in Cape Coast” by Dr. Mrs. Efua Sutherland, who was a distinguished Ghanaian Dramatist and Pan-Africanist. In 1991 the idea gained root and took shape in an expanded form as the Pan-African Historical Theater Festival (PANAFEST).

In October of that year,  “Panafest” was officially launched and in December of the same year, the national phase of the festival was held in Cape Coast, Ghana after a series of activities which included a national playwriting competition, organized seminars and workshops on Pan-Africanism across the country.

The “Panafest” addresses the most traumatic interruption that ever occurred in the natural evolution of African societies which among other traumas, profoundly eroded the self- confidence and freedom for self-determination of a whole people.

These constitute an impediment to the progress of Africans and must be laid to rest. Ghana’s coast line is dotted with large, now silent memorials to over 500 years of this most turbulent era in Africa’s history the festival consciously makes them a site for confronting the effects of enslavement, purging the pain of diaspora, acknowledging the residual effects of the trade on the continent and re-uniting to forge a positive future in the contemporary global environment.

The festival through the Grand Durbar in Cape Coast and the Royal Procession in Assin Manso will feature unique atonement rituals. The now deeply meaningful and popular Reverential Night will take place at Cape Coast Castle Dungeon culminating in the reading of the Emancipation Declaration.