Rakumi is continuing to present and encourage African arts in the Northwest and internationally. During the past year, Rakumi Arts has brought you praise singers and visual arts from Mali, a sampling of recent films from West and South Africa, and a wide range of concerts including the span of African music-- from our free outdoor party with the Mahotella Queens last summer to Rajery in May and D’Gary coming to Bellevue CC in August. In addition, a recording session for the treasured Ghanaian legend Koo Nimo was completed before he returned to Kumasi.

Rakumi also became grounded in a new space locally and an electronic space internationally. Seattle’s new office is located at 1402 20th Avenue East, next door to a thriving café. The staff and board are now able to meet with films, tapes and archives at their fingertips. Our nigeria-arts.net project is now on the ground in Lagos Nigeria and up and running in cyberspace. With generous support for development from the Ford Foundation, the site will give hundreds of artists, musicians, and authors a place on the worldwide web. You can get a look at our new Lagos offices by visiting the contact link from the site (www.nigeria-arts.net). et and for the location of a project which now gives Rakumi a second home in Lagos where another office is now up and running.

There was a point of pause last fall when a project that involved collaboration between Bill Frisell and Boubacar Traore was interrupted in the shadow of September 11. We now anticipate Frisell and Traore will once again come together to put the finishing touches on the project. The cancellation of this year’s WOMAD festival at Marymoor Park can be viewed as another setback in that we will not have the saturation of world music that we’ve come to expect during the WOMAD summers. However, with the recently completed Zimfest at the Seattle Center and the surprisingly full calendar of African and world music artists coming to the Northwest over the remainder of the summer, it appears there’s a fairly substantial menu of music and arts from which to choose after all.