Why are Nigerians celebrating this holiday?

On Tuesday, October 31, 2017, is Halloween.

The day is celebrated by many Western countries and is said to have pagan roots. On Halloween Day people play dress up and traditionally wear scary costumes. These days you can dress like any famous person.

Widely regarded as a day to celebrate spirits and other things supernatural. Halloween has been the basis of countless horror movies.

With its clear pagan roots, it is surprising that Halloween is now being celebrated in a country like Nigeria.

This year, posters have gone up about Halloween parties that are about to go down in Lagos. It seems every year the buzz around Halloween gets bigger and bigger here.

In a deeply religious country like Nigeria, why are people celebrating Halloween? Nigerians have been known to be a double standard.

The average Nigerian individual won’t go for indigenous cultural events such as New Yam Festival or Ojude Oba because they believe it is fetish and demonic.

The celebration of Halloween and the shunning of traditional Nigerian events fit into the narrative of “theirs is good and ours is bad.” Simply put, Sango and co are demonic but Thor and Loki are superheroes.

This narrative is a relic of the colonial era that has unfortunately not left us till today.

We cannot also overlook the power of the media. American media (the most powerful in the world) has been able to present Halloween as just a fun loving day with little or no spiritual or pagan roots. It has been able to sell the day to people of different cultures without attaching the spiritual and cultural contexts.

It’s the same way we celebrate Santa Claus or Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny without knowing they have pagan origins.

Nigerians celebrating Halloween have been hooked by the brilliant marketing scheme of Americans. Essentially, Halloween is bad but the festival in your village is evil.