The Third Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN) held between December 10 and 31, 2010, was announced as heralding a Renaissance of Africa and its Diaspora, through an aesthetic embrace and a celebration of its creativity and its diverse identity. It was a projective extension of a vast programme of revival and unity encompassed in the ambitious New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) initiative. President Abdoulaye Wade, initiator of the festival, was one of the proponents of NEPAD, along with Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Thabo Mbeki (South Africa) and Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Algeria). However, Wade's brand of renaissance is a product of delirium. It is a one-man show ripped out of the temporal frame of the African revival movement that enjoins moderation, lucidity and self-restraint as a sign of and in the service of progress. Wade's brand of renaissance is a belaboured concept emptied of its essence, and laid bare in its superfluity: a form of renaissance as posture which departs in so many ways from African Renaissance as praxis.

But we have to look beyond Wade's tendencies and tastes for extravaganza, and his desperate, reductivist attempts to leave his name to posterity.