By – Bamijoko Favour

The age-long story goes that the University of Ibadan and her students are zealously preoccupied with academics or an almost non-existent socio-cultural life on the receiving end. While it is true that the University is heavily fixated on its academic aspects, the fact of the matter, beneath innocent surface, is that there is a subculture of growing arts, and lively entertainment. Truth is in recent times, there is a growing increase in the rate of social and cultural activities orchestrated by UItes within and without the school. Few are boisterous, some artsy, others serene. Together, all these knits closely to form a fibrous layer of a subculture to the community of the University. Read along as this article threads you through them.

W.S Theatre

From time to time, an imaginary time-traveling machine spews up thespians antique Greece — in the embodiment of students from Arts, Law, and all over the school — onto the bumpy stage of the Wole Soyinka theatre, where they mine, sing, act, and entertain. Week in week out, there is always a certain ensemble on stage acting out a script before an audience. The Soyinka theatre and its host of players have, over time, been a sustaining pillar for the growing subculture of entertainment on campus. The flatness or platitude that seemingly shrouds the University is always punctured when these actors and actresses take the stage. If you’re ever looking to shirk away from an artless cycle of classes and lectures, join the class of those faithful, who frequent the theater and come up for air.

Draper’s Hall – T.F.S

On a Thursday evening, around 4pm just when the sun loses its pugnacity for the day, wound up Madaki Road and follow Cross Road towards Institute of African Studies. Inside the round hall, Drapers Hall, you’ll find a medley of a group of people (including students) from all around, seated, focused on a projected screen, heartily passing the time away. The Thursday Film Series Club, UI, cannot go unmentioned when talking about the subculture of entertainment, and the hotspot of socio-cultural interactions. A movie club, TFS (for short) keeps up a weekly screening of movies — fiction, non-fiction — across a variety of genres. Her screenings also include documentaries. Every Thursday, scores of people are gathered and on days where the Club’s event involves a partnership with an external organization, the scores may run into a hundred people.

Unlike a random movie night that happens occasionally on campus, screening at TFS does not end when the movie or documentary stops.  After every screening, a post-screening interaction follows. The audience share opinions, comments and thoughts revolving around various aspects of what was screened. Discussions ranging from the movie’s production, to its subject matter and themes, to the cultural implications and importance ensue. In many ways, on its own level, TFS operates as a melting pot that brings students, both undergraduates and graduates, together. More interestingly, it gives you room for networking, and the development of friendship. If you are out of touch on a Thursday, looking for a means to inject vivacity, you could stroll through Cross Road into Drapers Hall.

A Shrine and a Market

But Thursday’s recreational life does not happen at Drapers Hall alone, nor does it end there. Along El-Kanemi Road, which branches southwest-wards from Lander Road leading to Nnamdi Azikiwe and Independence Halls, under a weathered, rustic-looking construction ensconced away by slender, elegant bamboo stalks, sturdy trees and palm fronds, sits the national headquarter of the Kegites Club, University of Ibadan.

It’s the twilight of a Thursday at the Kegites joint. The air is boisterously affable and markedly scented with the delicate tangy odour of palm wine. The drums are heaving, usually two rhythmic molos, two other melodic drums and one gong. The frenzied drummers, thumping their hands in several stunts. And the sonorous voices of men and women wounding air in rough but likable cadences. The point about the Kegites is not about getting inebriated with palm wines. In current times, it acts as a social wheel for cultural renaissance. Through their cultural songs, including what some have described as christo-kegites songs, the group preserves, promotes, and with clever manipulations which are oftentimes humorous, reinvents culture and cultural lore. Additionally, in its usual cheerful way, the club promotes unity. Thus, you can look forward to Thursday evenings with the Kegites if you desire a group preoccupied with cultural rebranding through cheerful songs.

Okigbo – ‘Poets-Tree’

Friday evenings take a poetic iteration — if that means something. By breaking metaphors, sharing rich lines of paradoxes, and with vivid motifs and imagery, the Okigbo Poetry Club comes alive on Fridays, not far from KDL. It should need no restatement, the essence of poetry or why people engage in it. If you have happened upon or taken time to see John Keating’s Dead Poet Society, you would have an understanding of its importance.  According to Keating, we write — and engage with — poetry because we are members of the human race. Perhaps, only members of the Okigbo Poetry Club fulfill their essence. After going about your noble (& boring) pursuits like medicine, law, education, engineering, all through the week, why not fellowship with the Okigbo Poetry Club to stay, or retain, life.

There are a host of other activities marking the fringes of the campus’ habitual academic-religious culture. Not too far away, at Tunde Odunlade Gallery, Bodija, at New Culture Studio, Mokola, Kingsmen Archery Club, Awolowo way, and in other pockets of places, there are groups of people engaging in one form of entertainment or the other. Amongst the mass of students, there is fandom of K-pop heads, for which LG recently organized a fiesta, and comic aficionados who gather yearly at the Ibadan Comic-con festival. While you go about your academic life, there is still quite a list of socio-cultural engagements for your leisure and social development.