See My World is a one-day film festival running 21 November at Contact theatre in Manchester, built around a specific philosophical proposition: that the structure of a festival — not just its content — can be decolonised. CEO and artistic director Tunde Adekoya has drawn on two Kenyan thinkers, the late Anglican theologian John Mbiti and the late Marxist writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, to shape an event that rejects screening fees, foregrounds community access, and treats the programme itself as a tool for collective self-understanding. Mbiti's concept of Sasa na Zamani — a temporal framework in which the past actively informs the present and near future — gives the festival its organising logic. See My World explicitly positions its programming as a loop: pan-African histories are revisited to generate forward motion, not merely commemorated. The 1945 Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, whose 80th anniversary was marked last year, functions as the local anchor point. Luminaries of postwar independence movements gathered there with a shared vision of liberation; Adekoya's festival treats that gathering as living precedent, not museum piece. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's contribution is sharper-edged. His 1986 book Decolonising the Mind argued that European colonial powers used language as their primary instrument of conquest, and that reclaiming African ways of knowing was essential to self-determination. Ngũgĩ famously abandoned English to write in Gikuyu and criticised the role missionary Christianity played in colonial rule. Both thinkers rejected the colonial assumption that African thought was inferior and stressed the centrality of community — but they diverged on religion, with Mbiti seeking common ground between African religions and Christianity while Ngũgĩ was an explicit Marxist. The festival's programme reflects these ideas in practice. Film-makers have been invited to submit works up to 30 minutes across all genres, with no screening fees — a direct challenge to the economic gatekeeping Adekoya identifies with standard festival structures. See My World is also premiering its own documentaries: Homage, which traces dance culture through present-day portraits and Manchester archival material, telling a story of joy, loss, migration, rhythm, and resistance; and Poetic Justice, which connects pan-African thought with Manchester's poetry scene across decades. The festival sits within See My World's year-round programme showcasing pan-African arts, culture, and events across the north of England. What distinguishes it from the broader wave of diversity-focused programming is the insistence on philosophical scaffolding — naming specific thinkers, specific concepts, and specific historical events as the load-bearing structure rather than treating representation as an end in itself. Adekoya frames the work as an ongoing search: "We've been looking for literature and concepts that inform us and give us an understanding of who we truly are." The ambition is not simply to screen diaspora films but to model what a festival looks like when its architecture — who pays, who speaks, who is centred — is rethought from first principles. Whether this translates beyond a single day at a single venue is the open question. The ideas are real; the scale is still intimate.
