Africa Oyé returns to Sefton Park on 20 and 21 June, and Liverpool gets it back after a fallow year in 2025. The UK’s largest African and Caribbean music festival, which drew over 80,000 people to its last edition in 2024, returns with a bill that spans Lagos, Bamako, Kinshasa, Maputo, Accra and Port of Spain across two days. Founded in 1992 by Kenny Murray, the 2026 edition of the weekender arrives with one major change. Infrastructure costs climbed, supplier prices jumped 20 to 30 per cent across the sector, and the board, Artistic Director Paul Duhaney and the team took the decision together to introduce tickets for the first time in the festival’s 32-year history to keep it alive and protect it for the next 32. Prices have been kept deliberately low, starting at £11, with free entry for under-12s with a paying adult, plus group, student and NHS rates. The park that has hosted the festival since 2002 has its own part in the story.
Sefton Park, where Oyé pitches its stages, is a Grade I-listed park covering 235 acres of Liverpool’s south end, designed in the 1860s by Édouard André and Lewis Hornblower, with the Grade II-listed Palm House at its centre. The Palm House was gifted to the city in 1896 by banker Henry Yates Thompson, whose family fortune, like much of Liverpool’s wealth, was rooted in the slave trade and the colonial exploitation of Africa and the Caribbean. Generations of African and Caribbean families settled in Toxteth, Granby and the docklands and made Liverpool their city. For more than two decades, Oyé has filled Sefton Park every summer with their music, their languages and their food.
Saturday is headlined by Patoranking, the Nigerian singer making his Liverpool debut. Born Patrick Nnaemeka Okorie in Lagos, he has spent more than a decade blending Afrobeats, reggae and dancehall, from the breakout singles “Alubarika” and “My Woman, My Everything” through to “Babylon” and this year’s “African Soldier”, a collaboration with Buju Banton drawing on roots reggae and dancehall, that arrives as the second single from his forthcoming fifth studio album.
Sunday closes with Fatoumata Diawara, the Malian singer and guitarist who made her UK festival debut at Oyé in 2011 after pressing a CD into Duhaney’s hands while still touring with Oumou Sangaré’s band. She plays Sefton Park two weeks after the release of Massa, her fourth album, a record that pulls back from the high-profile collaborations of her previous work to focus entirely on her own story, addressing motherhood, betrayal and the death of her father, sung in Bambara and rooted in the Wassoulou traditions of southern Mali.
On Saturday, Oumy brings Senegal to Sefton Park, rapping and singing in Wolof, French and English, her 2022 album Possible taking on the subjects that Senegalese society would rather leave unspoken: female genital mutilation, domestic violence and rape, alongside a direct call to young Senegalese people to stay and build their country. Ghorwane follow on their 40th anniversary tour. The Maputo band, formed in 1983 and named after a lake in Gaza province that locals say never dries out, sang political lyrics sharp enough that state security attended their concerts to monitor the words. They recorded Majurugenta at Real World Studios in 1991 after Peter Gabriel brought them to WOMAD, but their saxophonist and composer Zeca Alage was beaten to death in Maputo before the album came out. The anniversary run carries his name every night.
King Ayisoba knows something about music as a lifeline too. He spent his first three years unable to walk until a medicine seller told his father to give the boy a kologo, a two-stringed lute made from a calabash gourd at the heart of Frafra music in northern Ghana. It worked. He taught himself while taking the family cattle to graze in Bongo Soe, played markets and funerals across the Upper East Region, then carried the music to Accra and eventually across Europe. Montreal-based Congolese Kizaba warms the park up for Patoranking, singing and playing drums and percussion simultaneously on stage, moving between languages mid-song and running the whole thing against 3D projections of traditional Congolese masks, with a guitarist, a DJ-pianist and two dancers pulling soukous and ancestral Congolese rhythms through electronic production and Afro-pop.
On Sunday, Awale Jant Band take the first slot, the London-based collective led by Senegalese vocalist Biram Seck, whose father was a master of the xalam, and French guitarist Thibaut Remy combining sabar drums, saxophone and trumpet in a sound that moves between Senegalese soul, Afrojazz and Latin rhythm, built in south London but rooted firmly in Dakar. Trinidadian-Canadian Kobo Town, fronted by Drew Gonsalves and named after the Port of Spain neighbourhood where calypso was born among the chants of stick-fighters, pull the lineage of Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrow through reggae, ska and dub.
Fulu Miziki are next… The Kinshasa six-piece take their name from the Lingala for “music from garbage” and mean it literally, making everything they play and wear from material pulled off the city’s streets, jerry cans, PVC piping, car parts, broken electronics, old flip-flops, with music that pulls Congolese rumba and soukous through something closer to punk. Janet Kay brings the British Caribbean story: her 1979 “Silly Games”, written and produced by Dennis Bovell with Drummie Zeb of Aswad on drums, was the first lovers rock tune on Top of the Pops and made her the first Black British woman to reach number two on the UK chart. Bovell built the song around a high note designed to make every woman in the dance try to sing it, taken from a Memorex advert in which Ella Fitzgerald broke a glass.
Before Fatou takes to the stage for the grand finale of the 2026 edition of Africa Oyé, Nana Benz Du Togo bring Togo to Sefton Park. Named after the working-class fabric traders of Lomé’s Grand Marché who rose to drive Mercedes Benz and advise presidents, the quintet sing electro-voodoo in English, French and Mina, their bass instrument, the Gazé Tuyau, built by hand from two lengths of PVC tubing over four years, their songs drawn from the voodoo scales of the snake deity Dan and Mamie Wata.
Behind the decks, BBC 1Xtra’s DJ Edu, whose Destination Africa show has spent years putting the newest sounds from the continent on the global map, and reggae and dancehall specialist Seani B, a 1Xtra veteran who made his Oyé debut in 2024, both play headline sets on the dedicated DJ stage for the first time this year. Liverpool-based DJ SoulfulTiz, head of the city’s Afrosentrik nights, covers the main stage between acts. If the main stage isn’t enough, the Trenchtown and Freetown zones run their own DJ programme across the weekend, each with a bar and dancefloor.
Step away from the music and the Oyé Village is worth a few hours on its own: over 90 stalls covering food from across Africa and the Caribbean, arts and crafts, fashion, hair braiding, henna, drumming workshops, and dance and art sessions in the Active Zone, plus a funfair and the Oyé Inn bar.
After a year away, Liverpool gets its African and Caribbean festival back, one that has spent three decades making the case that the communities who contributed to shaping this city deserve a weekend that is entirely theirs.
Tickets and the full programme are at africaoye.com