Festival as Peace Infrastructure: The Odi-Onin Festival and the Politics of Community Cohesion Among the Emeyal Clan of Bayelsa State, Nigeria

Cultural festivals in Africa have been studied chiefly through tourism, economic development and artistic display, with little sustained attention to their use as deliberate instruments of grassroots peacebuilding. This article examines the Odi-Onin Festival, instituted by the youth leadership of the Emeyal clan in Ogbia Local Government Area, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, as a case of an indigenous festival mobilised to heal fractures produced by unequal access to oil-derived benefits among the clan’s twelve communities. Drawing on oral interviews with organisers, traditional custodians and community members, together with participant observation, it reads the festival’s masquerade, drumming and dance, intergroup competition and communal feasting through Structural Functionalism, Symbolic Interactionism and Communitarianism. It finds that the festival operates as a ritual space of shared meaning, a mechanism of social integration and a moral appeal to communal obligation, and that its recurrence has improved inter-village relations since a reluctant, poorly attended first clan-wide edition. Financial dependency, political interference and youth disengagement threaten its future, and the article closes with recommendations for safeguarding such festivals in the oil-producing communities of the Niger Delta.