The 2020s have been a fascinating year to live on the internet. With the rise of social media influencing and celebrity business launches, it feels like everyone is trying to sell something and sieving to find genuine products has become herculean. This has led to hypervigilance in an attempt to spot hollow brands, and products targeting marginalised groups are found more suspicious. This was the case for Femme Fest’s 2024 post-event rollout.
The Date That Began It All
March might be the designated women’s month, with International Women’s Day on the 8th and Mother’s Day on the 30th. But in the wet streets of Lagos, Nigeria, women’s celebration extends to the second quarter of the year, with events like Femme Fest and HERtitude spearheading the movement.
The second quarter of the year is marked by its tremendous and unpredictable rains; the city of Lagos often finds itself flooded and unwalkable. So Easter has been synonymous with cold weather and wet roads. None of this has affected the highly packed event calendar of the Easter weekend. From the weekend-long Homecoming Festival to Vogue Boys’ party on Easter Monday, the only calendar that rivals this is the Detty December season.
Fascinating enough, Femme Fest is one of the few events that have experienced both the Easter and December crazes. Femme Fest, founded in December 2021, is the brainchild of Femme Africa, a media and entertainment company focused on young African women. Its first edition was a concert with an all-female lineup, with the then-promising act, Ayra Starr and Teni the Entertainer, headlining the event. The message was simple and clear: come to Femme Fest for a festival of femmes. Since then, the event has grown to incorporate masterclasses, workshops, and express stations. This has widened its attraction and audience, with an attendee recalling her favourite aspect, “My friends and I love Femme Fest because we also get piercings here at an affordable rate.”
This year was no different; the subtle information received was that Femme Fest has officially decided on the Easter season. Once is happenstance and three times make a pattern, and with its third consecutive Easter run, marked on the 18th of April—Good Friday—it seems that a pattern is firmly established.
But the main information it passed was a reaffirmation of its ethos because just a year ago, Femme Fest had found itself at the centre of a false marketing allegation scandal. With hounds of X (formerly Twitter) users, debasing it online, but was Femme Fest guilty of these crimes?
The Controversy
In 2024, Femme Fest established two things: its festival date will coincide with the Easter season, and it is not a women-only event. The latter came as a shock to the internet, with a Twitter user saying, “Change the name to Femmes & Hommes FEST, then we’ll agree that it’s for everybody.”
The online backlash was so severe that both the friends and the founder of Femme Africa spoke out in response. In the heat of the online ruckus, podcaster and long time fan of the brand, Jola Ayeye weighed in on X saying, “I have a soft spot for Femme Africa and I know what they are trying to do and already doing so I’m definitely biased but they’ve never said the festival was women only.”
Ayeye is well informed on the situation because her digital footprint shows that she has attended all editions of Femme Fest, including the pilot in 2021.
Not leaving Ayeye to fight out the war on her own, founder of Femme Africa, Ayomide Dokunmu, said that the event was created for the purpose of platforming female artists and business owners. She added that while Femme Fest is marketed specifically towards women, the festival is open to everyone.
This did nothing to dissuade the antsy X users. They argued that Femme Fest had marketed itself as a women-only event, citing its use of “For Baddies Only” in one of its Instagram posters. However, outside that poster, there is no evidence where Femme Fest implied it was for women only. It has notably been self-labelled as Africa’s Biggest Celebration of Women. True to Dokunmu’s words, the focus has always been on uplifting female performers, and now, it has extended to endorsing female entrepreneurs. Despite having a well-documented history of being a get-together to support women in the industry, the accusations of false advertising hold little to no weight after examining Femme Fest’s posters and press rollout. Quite frankly, in the recap posts used for promotion, men are visibly in the background.
The closer you look at the accusations, the clearer the problem becomes; the true pea under the mattress was the date change…
I Think You Are Talking About HERtitude
The first rule of sleight of hand, a magician and con artist trick, is misdirection. By creating a ploy, people unconcentrate on what’s happening in front of them. In an NPR piece, Director, Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience, Barrow Neurological Institute, Professor Susana Martinez-Conde explained, “Magicians not only manipulate attention in space but also they manipulate at what point in time you pay attention to.”
This primary law of a con is unknown to many, but you can easily trick the human mind by moving two similar things into the same space and time. So when Femme Fest moved its date from December to the Easter season, it had unconsciously diverted the audience’s attention, and the lines began to blur with another event targeted at the same market with the same message— to celebrate women.
HERtitude, launched in 2022, is a women-only event organised by Zikoko. It was initially designed to increase public presence and audience growth for HER, a [Zikoko] category that tailors its content to women and their experiences, as revealed in a self-written article, Celeste Ojatula, the Art Direction & Identity Design lead of HERtitude 2022.
2022 was Femme Fest’s off year, and by the time it announced it was returning in March 2023, HERtitude had also announced its second edition. This made them direct competitors in the minds of many, as they were both marketed as women-focused events.
In her piece, Ojatula notes that when designing HERtitude’s brand identity, she explored other women-focused events, citing Femme Fest and Women of Guinness Hangout by Guinness Nigeria.
HERtitude’s launch was met with rave reviews, including myself, and it had set itself as an independent event, first of its kind— a women-only event. With only a handful of all-women events worldwide, this was unheard of in Nigeria.
The editor-in-chief of Zikoko, Ruth Zakari, explained that it is important for these [women-only] spaces to exist as a place for women to have a good time and find community. This minor detail was HERtitude’s unique selling point, which successfully set it apart from Femme Fest because two matriarchies can coexist.
But by 2024, when both events began running promotional campaigns, the mental sleight of hand started, and all began to sound the same; women-focused, women-only, those are synonyms, right? No, they are not. So when the new audience flocked to Sol Beach for Femme Fest 2024 and saw the old audience, they were shocked.
The string of all genders coming together to celebrate female artistes at Femme Fest has been running since 2021, with a male attendee expressing on X, “I love that Femme Fest stood on men being allowed to attend. That was ALWAYS their thing, and I remember having mad fun at the one Donli headlined years ago.”
In truth, it was always Femme Fest’s thing, and the women-only event was HERtitude’s. Femme Fest’s choice to join the Homecoming Festival calendar means their pre-event marketing will constantly overlap. For its 2025 edition, Femme Fest knew it had a lot to prove, and instead of kicking the men out, they reaffirmed their stance, reminding everyone why it was created.
The 2025 Femme Fest Celebration
The pink and purple setups at every nook and corner, and a Wonderland theme, made for an obvious messaging of the event— Femme Fest is for the girls.
Despite expanding its activities, its recent edition maintained its very ethos of honouring women. This was evident with its inclusion of a tearjerking Afropop exhibition curated by Culture Custodian in partnership with Spotify. The set-up akin the Stonehenge allowed attendees to move through the sections with ease.
The exhibit was divided into three sections: the pioneers, the vanguards, and the future. A description under The Pioneers read, “These artists are at the forefront of the African music renaissance. Over the years, they’ve shaped the zeitgeist while continuing to break new ground for the next generation.”
From icons like Onyeka Onwenu and Miriam Makeba, to defining sounds of today like Tiwa Savage, Yemi Alade, and Simi, and emerging stars like Qing Madi, Moliy, and Kold AF. The exhibition left no stone untouched and no female singers unrecognised.
This exhibition comes from the list of initiatives created to highlight women in the music industry who, despite breaking boundaries and winning Grammys still less recognised than their male counterparts. One of these initiatives includes Spotify’s Equal Programme, a movement levelling the music playing field for women by spotlighting and marketing their music. It is a curation of global and local playlists exclusively full of songs made by women. The platform allows musicians to reach millions of listeners who might not otherwise have discovered their music. Another initiative that marked a prerequisite for the exhibition was the Culture Custodian’s International Women’s Day brunch.
Femme Fest’s choice to partner with brands notable for challenging industry boundaries was a reminder of its reintroduction into our consciousness of its aim and an answer to its controversies. While the backlash over its inclusivity sparked heated debates, it also highlighted the need for clearer communication around its mission. The festival has always aimed to uplift female voices and celebrate the diverse identities of women, making it a platform for empowerment. So maybe we were wrong about Femme Fest’s intentions.
