11th Annual OpenMicFest

Date: Friday 28th December 2018
Venue: Independence Stadium, The Gambia, West Africa.
Event: The 11th Annual OpenMicFest

Music fans in the smallest country on mainland Africa, The Gambia, are once again gearing up for its biggest entertainment event, the Annual OpenMicFest.

Also dubbed 'The People's Event', the one-night festival (soon to become two nights in 2019) attracts as much as 15,000 music enthusiasts annually and features Gambian acts showcasing a local yet very diverse repertoire.

For a country that has no internationally recognized home-grown stars and where fans pay more attention to music from outside than within, the success of the OpenMicFest is quite fascinating. Most music aficionados in 'the Smiling Coast' never truly considered platforms for local acts worth their while until the OpenMicFest and it's feeder event, the monthly Open Mics came into being in late 2007. Being very grassroots oriented, these activities including the radio and TV shows created by Black Lynx Entertainment and partners like Mediamatic365 built a solid following and addressed gaps that seemed insurmountable to many before.

The OpenMicFest platform, while entertainment based, has also been utilized to advocate for social change. In December 2016, when the former President of The Gambia refused to hand over power after having lost the Presidential Elections, the OpenMicFest platform became the launchpad for a civil society movement called "#GambiaHasDecided". The resulting attention received by the grassroots movement quickly spread to the streets and became a catalyst in removing the former dictator from power. The 2017 OpenMicFest platform was also utilized to convey a message of oneness for all people living in the small but diversely populated West African state.

article posted by:Francis Abdul Malik Mendy, Black Lynx Entertainment