In January, 1977, while most Americans were busy watching “Roots,” seventeen thousand people convened in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC). A monthlong extravaganza that featured delegations from more than fifty countries, it has been described as the most important Black cultural event of the twentieth century—the high-water mark of a pan-African spirit unmatched before or since. There were concerts and colloquia, film screenings, art shows, and even a regatta. Wole Soyinka lectured, Miriam Makeba sang, and Jayne Cortez denounced global capitalism in verse. Nigeria’s oil boom financed the construction of a national stadium and a dedicated festival village, where guests from across the continent and its diaspora formed lasting bonds. For Marilyn Nance, then a twenty-three-year-old photographer from Brooklyn, it was an opportunity to connect with her roots that was infinitely more exciting than the travails of Kunta Kinte. “FESTAC was the Olympics, plus a Biennial, plus Woodstock,” she told an interviewer in a new book. “People have positioned it as science fiction, but it really did happen.”