A 'CultureFest' event which was hugely popular in the 1990s — with a theme of a united Bermuda — is set for a comeback in Dockyard next year.

Organisers the Emperial Group say Premier Ewart Brown, Governor Sir Richard Gozney and Opposition Leader Kim Swan have all backed their project to bring back the fondly remembered occasion.

Up to 20,000 people used to pack into Dockyard for music, entertainment, food, arts and craft, before the initiative lost some its traditional cultural aspect while evolving into the star-studded Bermuda Music Festival.

Now the Emperial Group — a grassroots organisation with a motto of 'unity in the community' — says it wants to cash in on recent calls for unity from many of Bermuda's leaders.

Emperial's Gladwin Simmons told The Royal Gazette: "Here of late Ewart Brown has spoken of unity and one Bermuda. We as a group have sought quietly and received quietly his endorsement of that concept.

"We recognise that we need to establish the prerequisite within the community to launch a programme that can ultimately bring the diverse community to one place in the spirit of unity in the community of one Bermuda.

"So we have been fulfilling that objective via having sessions with the Premier, the Governor and the Opposition Leader and other social stakeholders within the community that have embraced this concept: that we need broad community involvement to address any number of the issues that are concerns in the community.

"Race, education, crime, the environment, you name it. It takes a broad community or collective unified approach to address these things.

"But how do you get broad unity participation when at any given time the very entities that are invested with the interest of the community are at conflict with those elements that it needs to bring to the table in a collective?

"That which we seem to most need, which is unity in the community of reconciliation, which CultureFest stood for, is what now the community at large, across all sectors, are asking for.

"Everybody right now is asking for unity in the community. We had a centrepiece that laid an undeniable foundation for that to manifest but it was opted to be replaced by MusicFest."

Colleague Eugene Dean said: "We already have endorsement from the Premier, the Governor, the Leader of the Opposition, both directly and indirectly because they are talking about unity in the community.

"We recognise that we are a consensus driven organisation. CultureFest is an event that's intended to unify our entire community.

"We recognise the importance of taking the time to ensure that the entire community is in favour of seeing this event activated again.

"The key stakeholders are the leadership. In our growth, we have formed powerful relationships and alliances across all areas of the community and for the most part the grassroots community and general populous are in favour of the community-oriented events that we already do.

"Therefore it was the leadership we needed to receive endorsement from to ensure we had really covered the spectrum."

CultureFest will run at around the time of year of the music festival, but the pair say it will not detract from it or rival it and, with backing from the community, funding will be a "drop in the bucket".

Mr. Simmons said: "CultureFest would be in some ways like Trinidad Carnival, in the sense that the Trinidad Carnival has a run-up of several months, building costumes, floats, competitions between neighbourhoods to establish kings and queens.

"With CultureFest, it will have its own run-up in the theme of unity in the community. That gives us an opportunity to draw on neighbourhoods that are polarised, given attention that's embracing as opposed to isolating, to bring that community back into the fold."

Mr. Dean added: "The main thing is for people to recognise Culture Fest is more of a programme than an event. A lot of times people can be supportive of a theme but wonder how connective the event is towards addressing its own theme.

"CultureFest is meant to be very tangible, very active and very engaging and very long-term in terms of its structure."

Emperial has been given hope by the visit from Louis Farrakhan it organised this summer, which did not yield the negative reaction many had feared from the white community and the media.

"The initial reaction to his coming even from out of our own camp was that it would only further polarise an already polarised community with respect to race," said Mr. Simmons.

"Seeing as how we were able to manage that five-day period with someone of the calibre of the honourable Louis Farrakhan and not precipitate a whole lot of negative racial reaction is to give hope, and not in a small way, that there are individuals in the community that have a very keen sense of diplomacy and understanding of the racial dynamics and how to navigate through those dynamics."