Afrika Festival Hertme
Hertme has roughly 500 residents. For one weekend each summer, that number multiplies. Thousands of people drive into the village, set up at the open-air theatre, and listen to musicians from Mali and Senegal and Ethiopia and Zimbabwe play to a Dutch farming audience. The math is implausible. A village this small should not be able to mount a festival that the British magazine Songlines voted into Europe's top twenty-five three years running. Yet it does, with about 400 volunteers, which means almost every Hertme resident old enough to lift a folding chair has a job to do that weekend. The festival started in 1989 with a single visiting dance group from Burkina Faso. It has not stopped.
A Doctor's Festival
Much of the credit for keeping the Afrika Festival alive belongs to Rob Lokin, a retired general practitioner from the area who became the driving organizer. In 2010 the Dutch Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation awarded him the Silver Carnation, a national honor for volunteer cultural work. The festival itself has now run for over thirty editions, with the only break coming in 2020 when the pandemic forced cancellation. In 2021 the event went online; in 2022 it returned to the open-air theatre in person. Throughout, the structure has stayed roughly the same: two days, a main stage, an African market with over a hundred stalls, caterers selling mostly African snacks, and a side program of dance and music that runs alongside the headliners.
The Lineup
Read the artist list and you read three decades of the major figures of African music. Oumou Sangare and Salif Keita from Mali. Youssou N'Dour from Senegal. Hugh Masekela and the Mahotella Queens from South Africa. Oliver Mtukudzi from Zimbabwe. Tinariwen from the Sahara. Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti from Nigeria, carrying their father Fela's Afrobeat tradition. Bonga from Angola. Habib Koite, Boubacar Traore, Vieux Farka Toure, Fatoumata Diawara, Songhoy Blues. Tony Allen, the drummer who shaped Afrobeat with Fela Kuti, played here in 2013. Alpha Blondy brought his Solar System in 2018. Salif Keita came back as recently as 2024. For a festival in a village no one outside Twente has heard of, the booking is staggering.
The Village That Says Yes
Hertme sits in the municipality of Borne in the Twente region, low rolling farmland between the Dinkel and the German border. The Openluchttheater Hertme, the open-air theatre that hosts the festival, sits in a natural bowl that the audience treats as their living room for the weekend. The numbers in 2019 were modest by world-music-festival standards, around 4,000 attendees, but those 4,000 outnumber the village's permanent population by a factor of eight. The festival's logistical achievement is therefore not its size but its proportion. To run an event of this kind, every available house, field, and pair of hands has to be enlisted. The 400 volunteers are not a footnote. They are most of the village.
Why Africa, Why Here
The origin story is almost too simple to believe. In 1989, a dance group from Burkina Faso performed in the open-air theatre, more or less by accident of programming. The response was strong enough that someone decided to do it again the next year, and then again. There was no master plan to make rural Overijssel a node in the global circuit of African music. It just happened, gradually, and then stuck. Today the festival is one of the things that anchors Hertme's identity, and one of the longest-running African music events in continental Europe. It is held in late June or early July, when the Twente weather usually behaves, and when the open-air bowl is dry enough for a few thousand people to sit on the grass and listen.
From the Air
The Afrika Festival site sits at 52.320N, 6.758E, in the village of Hertme in the Twente region of eastern Overijssel, very close to the German border. From the air the village is small and easily missed, identifiable mainly by its position northeast of the larger town of Borne and west of the city of Almelo. The Openluchttheater is a natural amphitheatre tucked into woodland on the village edge. Nearest major airport is Munster Osnabruck (EDDG) just across the border in Germany, with Enschede Twente (EHTW) closer in. Best viewed from low altitude; the woodland setting makes the venue itself nearly invisible from the air outside the festival weekend.