Nigerians and Birthdays: How We Celebrate

+Nigerians are, by nature, celebratory animals. Point black. We love our parties, the +Owambes with no apologies. And when we party, we party real big.

Recently, a number of events kept me thinking about how we celebrate, as a people, as a nation. As I researched the topic, I came across Prof. Niyi Akinnaso's beautifully written piece on Nigerians and Birthday Celebrations and thought it's worth sharing, albeit abridged.

"The celebration of birthday anniversaries is one of the acquired cultural practices from the West that NIgerians have overextended in the process of domestication, just as they have overextended the use of titles and honorifics. This is particularly true of the +Yoruba ethnic group, whose cultural and linguistic practices I have had the privilege to study professionally as an anthropologist and linguist. A unique feature of the Yoruba is the encapsulation of their rich cultural tradition in various genres, such as Odu Ifa, Ijala, and Oriki. Unfortunately, much of it has been sidelined by Westernisation, Christianity and Islam.

...perhaps no acquired Western practice is as elaborated by Nigerians as birthday anniversary celebrations. Our forefathers never celebrated birthdays. To start with, in the absence of writing and accurate record keeping, they did not know their exact birthdays... Birthdays are the most ubiquitous and the most elaborated among person-oriented events. In today's literate families, birthday celebrations begin at age 1... The elaboration of these celebrations is particularly evident in adult birthday parties, especially at ages 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80.


In Nigeria, however, the celebration have become big parties involving huge expenditures. Three innovations have been introduced to birthday parties in recent years. One is huge cash gifts, in the form of “envelopes” and “spraying” during the host’s dance. The amount involved often depends on the social or political standing of the host and the quality of the invited guests. The size of the hall, the number and quality of guests, the quantity and quality of food and drinks, and who provides the live music are all indications of social or material standing of the host.

The second innovation is newspaper congratulatory advertorials, which often serve various purposes for their sponsors. The major sponsors of such advertorials are family members, friends, industrial and commercial establishments, political parties, state governments, contractors, and political office holders. The most elaborate examples in recent years were the 133 pages of adulating advertorials and tributes in The Nationnewspaper of Thursday, March 29, 2012, congratulating former Lagos Governor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, on the occasion of his 60th birthday anniversary.

The third innovation is the exportation of birthday celebrations to some foreign location, notably, Dubai and London. This practice is becoming popular among politicians, corporate bosses, and the novae riche, who often make their money from one kind of corrupt practice or the other. Given the scale and dimensions of birthday celebrations today, their social and economic implications deserve close study.

True, culture and language are dynamic. They undergo change. Some practices and words are dropped, while new ones are taken on, often through borrowing from others. The problem with Nigerians is that so much have been borrowed and adopted from outside that the peoples’ cultural and linguistic roots have been shaken to their foundations. The repercussions are grave for future generations."