The lineup history reads like a passport stamped at every continent that produced great music in the second half of the twentieth century. Nina Simone played Sfinks in 1988, the same year as Ali Farka Toure, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Alpha Blondy. Tito Puente led his Latin big band in 1983. Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine tango revolutionary, played in 1985, alongside Junior Walker. Youssou N'Dour came twice in the late 1980s and again in 1995. Manu Dibango, the Cameroonian saxophonist whose Soul Makossa had already changed how the world thought of African pop, played the breakthrough 1982 edition that re-oriented Sfinks toward the wider world. The Sun Ra Arkestra appeared in 1984. Cesaria Evora, Khaled, Gilberto Gil, Papa Wemba, Habib Koite, Amadou & Mariam - the names accumulate into a kind of informal canon of world music's first golden generation.

There is no obvious reason a world-music festival should exist in a Flemish farming village of fifteen thousand people. Boechout sits about eight kilometres south-east of Antwerp's centre, surrounded by fields rather than concert halls. But the small scale is exactly what made Sfinks work in its first decades: the audience camped, ate together, watched Senegalese percussionists in the afternoon and Bulgarian wedding bands at night, and walked back to their tents through the same field. The 'Molenveld' site, adopted in 1994 when the schoolyard could no longer hold the crowds, was a meadow with a windmill nearby. The setting was emphatically rural, the music emphatically global, and the contrast was the point.

For most of its history Sfinks has been free to enter - one of the only major festivals in Europe to remain so. The funding comes from a mixture of subsidies, food and drink sales, and the kind of voluntary effort that small Belgian towns are famously good at producing. The festival keeps an explicit social mission: to expose Flemish audiences to musical traditions they would otherwise never encounter, and to give those traditions a paying European stage. By the 2010s the festival had shortened from four days back to three, but the formula held - midday talks and workshops, evening main-stage shows, late-night DJ tents.

What Sfinks really sold its audiences, year after year, was a first encounter. The first time a Belgian teenager heard Qawwali singing through a loud festival PA, it was probably Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at Sfinks. The first time many Flemish music critics heard Cape Verdean morna, it was Cesaria Evora here in 1996. The first time some heard Tuareg desert blues, it was Tinariwen in 2014. These are the kinds of musical moments that do not survive in the official histories of pop but lodge permanently in the personal histories of the people who happened to be standing in a Boechout meadow on the right summer night. The festival made world music local.