The beloved annual Atlanta African Dance & Drum Festival celebrates traditional African dance and music.
Dancers in traditional African attire.
Hosted by the Afrikan Djeli Cultural Institute, the annual celebration has become one of the most anticipated summer festivals.
A Brief History and Overview
The Atlanta African Dance and Drum Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary last weekend at Sylvan Hills Middle School in southwest Atlanta. Over the years, its mission has remained the same: to honor the ancestral traditions of Africa while making them accessible to modern audiences. Dancers and drummers from across the continent gathered for the 16th Annual Atlanta African Dance and Drum Festival, a three-day celebration of the region's culture.
The festival, which began on Friday, July 25, runs through Sunday, July 26, and features workshops led by instructors from Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Angola, drawing both seasoned performers and newcomers to African traditions.
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Key Highlights of the Festival
Now in its 16th year, the event returned to East Point with three days of music and movement workshops, an artisan marketplace and a high-energy finale concert featuring the acclaimed St.
From July 25 through July 27, dancers, drummers and families from across the country came to Atlanta to celebrate the cultures of the African diaspora. Mark your calendar because Friday, July 25 through Sunday, July 27 you can experience the movements of the diaspora!
“I started this just to provide an opportunity for drummers and dancers to expand their learning, provide a chance for people to witness production,” said Frazier, who has put on the festival every year except for 2020 due to COVID-19. “It was an extension of a space that I had where we had various classes.
Saturday evening’s highlight features a concert performance of “The Goddess Zaouli Lives” by the Afriky Lolo West African Dance Company from St. Louis. The Serpent dance from “The Goddess Zaouli" at last weekend's African Dance and Drum Festival (Photo by Mark Gresham)
The World's Most Impossible Dance Explained || African Dance Style (Zaouli)
The Significance of Dance and Music
For many instructors like Sako, who teaches weekly community classes in Boulder and performs at weddings, baby showers and cultural events, the festival represents an annual homecoming of sorts. “It’s very good to see people enjoying themselves,” Frazier said.
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“I would say, on a real basic level, leave at least one or two steps that the teachers taught,” Frazier said of his hopes for participants. “If they took a drum class, at least leave with some parts of some of the rhythms that they learned. Leave with a sense of family.
At the beginning of the Atlanta Music Project classes in October 2010, the Atlanta Music Project students did a four-week African Drum and Dance workshop led by Atlanta’s own Manga African Dance. The workshop ended in style, with the students performing a great concert of drum and dancing from Guinea, Liberia and other West African nations.
This workshop: teaches African history through music, dancing and story, builds a culture of community among our students, develops their internal rhythm and sense of moving naturally to music and gives them a chance to perform a concert as a group very quickly after AMP classes start. First ever AMP classes, rehearsing African drum and dance.
African Drum and Dance workshop.
Featured Artists and Performances
Diádié Bathily, the Ivorian-born founder and artistic director of Afriky Lolo, was one of the featured professional dance instructors for the Festival. Bathily’s commitment to honoring tradition mirrors the values of the Afrikan Djeli Cultural Institute (ADCI). Founded by artist and entrepreneur, Aiyetoro Kamau, ADCI has been instrumental in nurturing a space for diasporic African arts in Atlanta, not only through the Festival, but through seasonal classes, youth education and community engagement.
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Among the featured instructors is Djeneba Sako, 57, a Mali native who has become a fixture at the festival since first attending in 2003. “I bring my culture to share with everybody here,” said Sako, who demonstrated the “Didadi” dance during Friday’s activities. “Didadi is a sweet dance,” Sako said. “If you’re dancing or you’re playing, you’ll be happy. If you are angry, you forget you’re angry, if you have a lot of things on your mind, you’ll forget.
The Goddess Zaouli
The piece is based on a folk tale of the Gouro (or Guro) people of central Ivory Coast, adapted for stage by Afriky Lolo’s artistic director and choreographer, Diadié Bathily. The story centers on the coming of age of Djela Lou Zaouli (danced by assistant choreographer Rokya Ouattara), when her father, the noble and powerful Lion (Derek K. Zaouli’s father decides that only the Bird and the Serpent meet his criteria for worthiness, and sets them as competitors in a contest to win the hand of Zaouli. They must race two days and two nights to reach her, and the first one to touch her red scarf wins. The interplay of dance, dialogue and drumming, along with exotic and symbolic costuming, played an important role.
Zaouli’s colorful costume included raffia around waist, wrists and ankles, and a large mesh leotard. A headdress of cloth draped down below her shoulders. The dancer also held a cow tail in each hand. Heartbroken and dying of hunger and thirst herself, Zaouli ran to the forest, where she collapsed and died. In advance of Afriky Lolo’s performance of “The Goddess Zaouli” came a suite of diverse, energetic drumming by the Djeliba Drum Ensemble, a collective of percussionists organized by the Afrikan Djeli Cultural Institute’s own Aiyetoro Kamau, who emceed the concert and oversaw the festival operations at large.
Cultural Significance and Impact
“Americans, especially African Americans, deserve to know their culture,” he told ArtsATL. “It’s so diverse. I cannot be numb to it. Bathily founded Afriky Lolo in 2003 after he came to the United States and taught in the African dance program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
After three months, the university decided to extend his stay. “The community demanded that I stay longer, including some of the universities and dance studios,” he explained. “They felt like what I’d been teaching was completely new and it came with incredible information African Americans and Americans needed.
While many African dances have been adapted or modernized for the stage, Bathily remains committed to cultural authenticity. The Afriky Lolo performance featured a cast of more than 40 dancers and musicians from ages 6 to 60, including Bathily himself, with live drumming and elaborate costuming brought from Ivory Coast. “It’s part of the culture. I love that because it’s representing a village in Africa. You have to be humble as you are learning. Dance is fine, music is fine, but education in the dance exists also, and people forget about that.
To keep people together, you have to educate them on how to stay together and how to respect each other. Dancers perform traditional dances in elaborate costumes during this annual festival.
For Bathily, the Atlanta festival holds personal significance. “Atlanta is one of the amazing places in America. They have a huge African American community and have been doing African dance for a very, very long time before even I came to America. We feel like we are a community, even with Atlanta people, because the dancers, we know each other; the leaders, we know each other.
Bathily hopes the audience leaves the show not only entertained but inspired. His final piece of advice? “I will advise everyone to dance. Please dance,” he said. “Nobody is a good dancer or a bad dancer. Dance is expression. It’s therapy in Africa. You can have people having a lot of problems. But once we arrive in that place with everybody, they forget about what is going on, and they are sharing that moment. That moment you feel like you are in heaven; you feel like you are on top of a mountain when you go in the middle of that circle, people cheering and clapping for you, healing you from everything. This is traditional therapy. And I’m saying therapy, but it’s more than that. Because African dance and drum is a healing thing for human beings.
Other African Cultural Events in Atlanta
SEPTEMBER 12 - 13 2025ATLANTA ANNUAL AFRICAN CULTURAL FESTIVALThe Atlanta African Cultural Festival is a lively fusion of African and African diaspora dances and rhythms, presenting a diverse array of traditions through the art forms of drumming, dance, and other cultural expressions.
Manga African Dance has expanded the Osun festival to include a broader range of African diaspora traditions, in addition to a pan African repertoire.
The Osun (pronounced O-shoon) Festival honors the Yoruba river goddess, Osun. The production is presented each August in Oshogbo, Nigeria. They are dances of celebration and expression of love, beauty, wealth, intimacy, diplomacy, strength, and harvest from African countries and the diaspora.
Osun dances are the ritualistic dances of Praise. They are dances of celebration and expression to the Yoruba deity and mother fruitfulness. Osun is an embodiment of love, beauty, wealth, intimacy, diplomacy. She represents the freshwater from the ocean, and is celebrated every year in Osugbo. Among the dances dedicated to Osun, the Agbebe dance showcases the ritual object most associated with Osun, a secular fan that she uses as a source of authority and symbol of control.
The concert is a production that displays drumming, songs, acting, theatre, and energetic dances. The production portrays the fabulous festival held in Osogbo every August of each year. This performance allows young people to see youth their own age performing traditional African cultural traditions and exposes them to African culture. It is a fabulous production that transports the audience on a journey to West Africa. The inspirational production is presented each August almost simultaneously with the annual Osun Festival held in Oshogbo, Nigeria.
