OOU Cultural Day 2021: When Culture Became a Living Experience

There is a tendency to approach university Cultural Days as colourful interruptions to academic life: a day of traditional clothes, music, dance and food before everyone returns to the ordinary business of lectures and examinations. OOU Cultural Day 2021, however, offered something more substantial. Experienced as a festival rather than simply a campus celebration, it demonstrated how cultural programming can turn a university space into a temporary arena for memory, identity and communal expression. This is particularly significant at Olabisi Onabanjo University, where the study of Performing Arts encompasses African performance traditions alongside contemporary approaches to drama, dance, music and production. The festival therefore felt less like an ornamental celebration of heritage and more like an extension of the university’s cultural and artistic life.

What made the experience particularly effective was its sense of plurality. Rather than presenting Nigerian culture as a single, fixed identity, the festival allowed different cultural expressions to exist alongside one another, through clothing, movement, music and performance. The campus itself became part of the spectacle. Students were not merely spectators waiting for a programme to begin; their presence, costumes, interactions and movement through the space became part of the cultural experience. This is where the festival’s strongest achievement lay: it made culture visible and participatory without reducing it entirely to display. Research on OOU students has similarly highlighted the importance of Cultural Day in sustaining interest in indigenous culture, particularly within a student population increasingly exposed to contemporary and global cultural influences.

The production also understood an important truth about cultural festivals: their success depends on what happens behind the spectacle. Performances can be compelling, but without coordination, pacing, communication and an ability to manage the unpredictable, the experience quickly becomes fragmented. Olanrewaju Isiaq Akintonde, as creative producer, deserves credit for providing that organisational coherence. His strength was not in imposing himself on the festival, but in creating the conditions for its different parts to work together. The production carried the discipline necessary to accommodate performers, technical requirements and the competing demands of a large institutional event while allowing the cultural material itself to remain the focus.

More importantly, Akintonde and his team made sure that the festival did not seem embarrassed by the idea of celebrating tradition. That is worth emphasising in a contemporary university environment where cultural identity can sometimes be treated as something to perform ironically or occasionally rather than something worth inhabiting seriously. OOU Cultural Day 2021 allowed students to occupy their cultural identities publicly and collectively. It created an atmosphere in which inherited forms could encounter contemporary student life without either having to become museum pieces or surrendering themselves completely to spectacle.

The lasting value of the festival, then, is not simply that it produced beautiful images or entertaining performances. It created an encounter. For a few hours, culture moved from the pages of history and the language of academic discourse into bodies, voices, clothing, music and shared space. That is what a worthwhile cultural festival should accomplish. OOU Cultural Day 2021 understood that preservation is not achieved by freezing culture in place, but by giving it opportunities to be performed, experienced and reinterpreted by the people who will carry it forward. Its strongest production achievement was therefore also its strongest cultural one: it made culture feel present, communal and alive.