Last week, under the guise of cultural celebration, an entire community was held hostage by a tradition so vile it defies modern comprehension. It’s called the Alue-Do Festival, held in Ozoro, a town in the Isoko North of Delta state, Nigeria.
Festivals are meant to be a time of joy, a vibrant tapestry of community, heritage, and shared celebration. They are the moments we mark our calendars for, a chance to reconnect with roots and revel in collective identity. But last week, in Ozoro, the so-called Alue-Do Festival cast a dark and chilling shadow, reminding us that not all traditions deserve a place in the 21st century. For the women of Ozoro, it was a lockdown, a curfew enforced by the threat of sexual violence.
For those unfamiliar, the Ozoro Festival has a deeply disturbing component, a “tradition” that reportedly allows men to harrass and sexually assault any woman they find outside during the festival. It is a period of sanctioned terror, hiding under the guise of “culture”, where a woman’s autonomy is suspended and her body becomes a public commodity for male aggression.
When Tradition Becomes a Weapon
Culture is not a static monolith, immune to critique. It is a living, breathing entity that must evolve. Throughout history, societies across the globe have courageously confronted and abolished traditions that were once considered sacred: foot-binding, ritual scarification and the killing of twins. We look back on these practices with horror, understanding or at least trying to understand them as relics of a less enlightened time. The Ozoro festival’s violent underbelly belongs in this same category of abandoned barbarism. To defend it is to argue that a woman’s right to safety and bodily integrity is secondary to the preservation of a practice rooted in patriarchal control and violence.
The Chilling Faces of a Normalized Evil
What makes this even more eerie and profoundly disturbing are the faces of the perpetrators. In horrifying video clips circulating online, we see boys—some as young as ten—participating in the assault, their faces animated with a terrifying glee. These are not ‘animals’. They are boys who likely sit in classrooms, who know the latest TikTok trends, who have mothers and sisters and aunts waiting for them at home. Their enthusiastic participation reveals a truth that is far scarier than the tradition itself. It’s the terrifying endgame of a rape culture so normalized that we see its lesser forms every day. Even outside this festival, how many women can walk down the street without being harassed or catcalled? The Ozoro festival just rips off the mask, revealing the ugliest face of this societal sickness. It is a live demonstration of a society teaching its young men that a woman’s body is a playground for their aggression, and that her consent is a concept that can be suspended.
Imagine the psychological toll on the girls and women living in Ozoro. Imagine the days leading up to the festival, the mounting dread felt by every girl and woman there. The frantic warnings from mothers to daughters, the bolted doors, the shuttered window, teaching young girls that their world can shrink to the four walls of their home, and that their freedom is conditional.
An Incompetent Response and Sanctioned Violence
And what of the aftermath? To date, no formal arrest and charge has been made. People are always quick to advise that we should go to the police whenever there’s a sexual assault—now see, sexual assault happened live on camera and the police is still incompetent. The response from the Delta State Police, articulated by its Public Relations Officer, Bright Edafe, is a masterclass in institutional gaslighting. He stated that the girls harassed in the viral clips were interviewed and “none said they were raped.” We must ask: Is this incompetence or a willful refusal to see the crime? Let us be unequivocally clear: the absence of penetration does not mean the absence of a crime. What we all saw in those clips was sexual assault—groping, grabbing, and terrorizing young women. Of the hundreds of boys and men whose faces are clearly visible in these recordings, why has not one been arrested for sexual assault at the very least? The failure here is systemic. The Nigerian constitution guarantees the rights and safety of all its citizens. Rape and sexual assault are criminal offenses. How can a known, scheduled event where sexual assault is a celebrated feature be allowed to proceed, year after year? The complicit silence—and now, the dismissive rhetoric—of law enforcement is a deafening indictment. They are not merely neglecting their duty; they are effectively sanctioning the violence and telling the women of Ozoro that their rights are negotiable.
A Call for Justice and an End to the Terror
Local activists, NGOs, women, men and progressive voices within the community and across Nigeria are raising their voices in condemnation. The time for quiet acceptance is over. The Ozoro Festival cannot continue. It needs to be stripped of its violent core and totally abolished.
The Delta State Government and the Nigerian Police Force should do the jobs they are mandated to do. Enforce the law. Protect all citizens. We call on traditional leaders in Ozoro to summon the moral courage to definitively and permanently excise this cancer from their festival. And we call on ourselves—as journalists, as activists, as global citizens, as women—to keep the spotlight fixed on Ozoro, not just in the week of the festival, but every day, until every woman and girl can walk the streets of her own town at anytime without fear. A tradition that requires a woman’s terror to survive is not a tradition. It is a disgrace. And it must end now.
