Marketplace: a Bit of Africa Every Month

Just a few blocks from the hum of tires on the Santa Monica Freeway, another rhythm was pulsating on Saturday.

At the African Marketplace, held by the city-run William Grant Still Community Arts Center, drumbeats set the crowd moving as Sekou Ali Falade, a Yoruba priest, led the blessing that would get the two-day festival off to the proper start.

Every third weekend of the month, from July through September, the center, at 2520 Westview St., east of La Brea Avenue near Adams Boulevard, has turned its back yard and adjoining alley into a colorful bazaar crowded with tables full of food, fabrics and folk art from African countries.

Crafts and Entertainment

The two-day festival has a full schedule of entertainment, workshops, storytelling and arts and crafts events from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. each day.

“We want to incorporate the traditions of African culture,” said Cathy Person, the talent coordinator for the marketplace. “We’re attempting to bring together the African representation in Los Angeles through the arts, arts and crafts, even the vendors. You will not see anyone out here--unless we catch them--selling Lakers T-shirts.” Instead, bright batiks, intricately wrapped headdresses and bare feet were the fashion of favor and made it an afternoon of looking as well as listening.

Food from Ethiopian restaurants and homemade goodies added another dimension to the festivities.

“I smelled the African marketplace when I came here,” Sekou said. “And when you are able to smell, that’s your spirit you’re communing with.”

“There is a Chinatown in Los Angeles, an Olvera Street, a Koreatown, but there is no African cultural center,” said Grant Still director James Burks, who originated the marketplace two years ago.

Many Kinds of Music

He wanted to provide a place for the culture to be shared and to show the effects of the scattering of the African people.

The marketplace has arranged for African musicians, as well as reggae groups from Jamaica, Afro-Cuban and Afro-American blues bands to showcase the influence of African culture throughout the world.

And in a city not known for its intimacy, the crowded, narrow quarters of the marketplace provide a place where people can bump into each other--with no complaints.

“I love markets. It’s a great way to bring people together,” said Anastasia Powers, a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, as she lunched on a plate of Ethiopian food.

Barbara Venishnick and her family, visiting from Connecticut, came to the festival with her father, who lives here. Shouting above the Yoruba oriki (chants to the ancestral spiritual guides), she said she wasn’t surprised to find such an event in Los Angeles.

“I haven’t seen this in Connecticut,” she said. “You get a lot of fife and drums in Connecticut.”