In the heart of the summer of 1969, the first Pan-African Festival took place in Algiers. A festival immortalized on film, in a film by William Klein. By bringing together artists, writers, filmmakers, intellectuals and activists from all over Africa, and from the African diaspora around the world - in the broadest sense of these terms - it was a question of laying the foundations of a cultural policy on the scale of the entire African continent and, for Algeria, recently independent, of asserting itself, on all levels, in a role of leader of the anti-imperialist struggles.

On the musical side, the program was sumptuous. It notably featured, among many others, the names of Miriam Makeba, Barry White, Manu Dibango… Oscar Peterson, Nina Simone and the saxophonist Archie Shepp. The latter then escaped with his group to the South, into the desert, to reconnect with the rhythm of his ancestors. Genres merge, his jazz fills the night and gets lost in the dunes.