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Festival Nomade in Montreal

Posted on December 15th, 2011

I recently had the opportunity to attend several events as part of the 2011 Festival Nomade, a celebration of nomadic lifestyles and cultures held annually in Montreal.

The Festival is the brainchild of Mohamed Ould Atigh, a Montreal restaurant owner and entrepreneur who hails originally from Mauritania. (Atigh also puts together a yearly Festival Nomade in Ividjaren, in his native country.) This year’s event, which ran from December 6 – 11, featured art, performances, and food from nomadic communities around the world, including several from Africa.

As part of the Festival, Atigh and the other organizers also collaborated with students from the McGill Anthropology department to put on a public screening of the documentary film Milking the Rhino — which explores land rights and conservation in a Maasai community in Kenya and a Himba community in Namibia — as well as a panel discussion concerning challenges facing African pastoral communities. (These students included me, though others did far more work organizing the events than I did.)

The highlight of my experience at the Festival Nomade was the Saturday night “Nomad Music Night,” which featured a communal dinner at the “Nomad Nation” artists’ space in Mile End, followed by an impressive series of performances, including by the Senegalese drummer Ahmadou Ngom.

Not all of the participants in the Music Night were members of nomadic cultures. Some played music inspired by these cultures. Others simply identified as people who, as the Festival Nomade website states, “believe that home is not always found in a physical place.” Indeed, a major goal of the festival is to share a nomadic ethos with the broader community; to preach a spirit of minimalism and community. Not only does the festival raise awareness of endangered nomadic cultures, it also aims to inspire change in the West so that these cultures might survive long into the future.

(Click here to watch a short documentary about the Festival.)

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