Imagine that you’re holding a festival and it was due to start on Tuesday. A few days beforehand, problems begin to mount up – your sound engineer walks away, you mysteriously get locked out of your own website and the hotel that your guests are going to be staying at isn’t ready. In short, there’s a lot of things going wrong.
There are people travelling thousands of miles to be at the festival – who have paid for plane tickets, accommodation, and the rest. How would you respond to all this? Well, if you’re Fajara Dance Festival, the answer is badly – by disappearing from social media five days before the festival begins and only reappearing after media outlets like Ears To The House start contacting you.
We fail to see any other explanation for this statement issued by the organisers yesterday. Whilst they failed to respond to our request for comment, their statement was published hours after our story yesterday. And to say it’s a curious statement is quite an understatement…
Whilst apologising to the “distinguished guest DJs” and “valued attendees” for the disruption apparently caused by “unforeseen challenges”, the statement then veers off course entirely – making the intriguing claim that “there have been no financial improprieties or misleading actions”.
We can only presume this is a response to some who are speaking out on social media – for what it’s worth, Ears To The House has not seen any evidence to support such claims. And whilst the organisers are promising that headliners Boddha Satva and Aluku Rebels are due to play at an unspecified time, it’s unlikely to be much comfort to those who have already experienced difficulties.
Incidentally, Satva himself stepped forward to defend the festival briefly earlier on – before he mysteriously amended his Instagram post to remove this picture of him with a cohort in a car, including promoter Andree Turay. The post was then modified to remove the statement entirely – of which we share an extract below…
Incidentally, we’ve been in touch with some of the DJs who were due to play at the event – and although many are critical of the festival and its organisation, all are pretty much unified in saying they’re quickly becoming very fond of Gambia and its people…
