The Umoja Festival was a great outdoor concert presenting musicians, dancers and acrobats from Kenya, Tanzania. Ethiopia, the Netherlands and Norway. The concert attracted a huge crowd on a sunny afternoon in the Uhuru Park in Downtown Nairobi.
The Umoja Cultural Flying Carpet is a Norwegian initiative aiming at promoting peace and development through international cultural collaboration. According to Umoja, the label “Flying Carpet” is appropriate because “Culture is magic. Culture has the power to give us experiences that can make us fly, and fly as one”. Umoja has grown into a major sponsor in Africa with different “Carpets” covering 7 countries in two regions. The African countries that performed on Sunday are part of the Eastern Carpet. The Umoja annual concert rotates between the countries in the region: Next year the concert will be in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
This year’s participants from East Africa, the Netherlands and Norway have worked together for a long time to prepare the festival. The highlight in this process was the Sarakasi Camp in November where 120 people from five countries trained together. The Camp gave the participants the chance to become friends and created a platform for further dialogue.
The Sarakasi Trust, an organization based in Nairobi, was responsible for most of the preparations to this year’s Umoja festival. “Sarakasi” means acrobatics/circus in Kiswahili. The Sarakasi Trust aims at promoting culture and art in various forms. Sarakasi does this by offering disadvantaged youth in Nairobi with an opportunity to develop their potential and express themselves. For these young people, the Umoja festival was the perfect stage for displaying their skills. The young acrobats climbing a tall pole on the stage and defying gravity with their performances were definitely among the highlights on the programme!
The Norwegian Embassy is proud to support the Sarakasi Trust. We appreciate that Sarakasi gives deprived youth in Nairobi a forum to meet and express themselves. Through expression of culture, Sarakasi can contribute to peace and reconciliation in the deprived areas of Nairobi, having been hit so hard by the post election violence earlier this year. The Norwegian Embassy in Nairobi fully shares Sarakasi’s commitment to address these important issues and help Kenya’s youth towards a brighter future.