Organizers of Afrochella have announced a new name for the arts festival. It will now be known as AfroFuture.
Afrochella co-founder Ken Agyapong Jr. claimed that despite their announcement that the annual event would end in 2022, the festival will be held this year in Ghana.
According to the son of The MP for Assin central Constituency, they have decided to rebrand and give the event a new name and identity, hence, marking the end of the name ‘Afrochella’ last year.
Speaking on Hitz FM, Mr. Agyapong said “at the beginning of last year (2022) in February, when we dedicated that the theme for the year will be Afrofuturism, that is when we actually came up with the idea of changing names. Because, in the long run, we knew we were going to change the name”.
There were speculations the event might not make a return over a lawsuit from Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and its organizer, Goldenvoice for copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed in a California federal court on October 5.
In the suit, Coachella and Goldenvoice claim that Afrochella is “intentionally trading on the goodwill of [Coachella and Goldenvoice’s] well-known COACHELLA and CHELLA festivals and trademarks by actively promoting music events in the United States and in Ghana using the confusingly similar mark ‘AFROCHELLA’ and by fraudulently attempting to register Plaintiffs’ actual trademarks as their own.”
Mr. Agyapong refuted these allegations, saying that plans for the change from Afrochella to AfroFuture had been made months earlier. He revealed that even the names of their social media handles had been changed before the December 2022 event.
