21/10/2026
We were devastated to hear about the awful experiences that the , Munya Chawawa, and others from the beautiful cast of Chichester Festival Theatre's 'Midsummer' faced on the streets of .
Yesterday we wrote an email to Munya and The Black Boys' Theatre Club. After expressing sadness for the behaviour of our neighbours, we wrote:
All of us at WemsFest are proud to try to make a positive change in Chichester and the local area by helping to run a community interest company - we are all volunteers - to try to bring some life into Chichester!
We do this musically - we deliver about 50 gigs a year in the Chichester area and we try to make them as culturally varied as possible.
We have a friend, Ebou Touray, who runs an organisation in Brighton called African Night Fever, and we partner with Ebou to bring African musicians to our audience on a regular basis - particularly in October ( ).
Since WemsFest is a community interest company, any profits we make from bar & ticket sales are reinvested into the local community.
For the past 4 years we have chosen to put this money into subsidising musical workshops, with Black musicians, in local schools.
This means that over 1500 local students have had the chance to listen to, and often play music with, world-class musicians from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Caribbean, Cuba, and The Gambia.
We would LOVE to host your Black Boys Theatre Club at WemsFest (if you'd extend to music and not just theatre).
Please get in touch - YOU ARE ALWAYS WELCOME HERE.
Our second Black History Month-specific show is on Halloween - 31st October 8pm at The Old Malthouse (AKA Chidham Village Hall, PO18 8TP, about 10 minutes from central Chichester). We'll have Gambian kora maestro Sura Susso on, with his band, and then he'll be joined by Malian guitar virtuoso Habib Koité.
We expect all your students want to go trick or treating but there's still plenty of room in the audience if you wanted to come as our guest :)
