Pearl Chuks Builds Rooms Where Culture Comes Home

By Tomide Marv

There is a question that Pearl Nmachukwu Chukwuemeka, or Pearl Chuks for short, has been asking for years, one that has become the bedrock of everything she has built and contributed to: “Why do we only party at night?”

This sounds almost cliché or unimportant. But for Pearl, growing up in Abuja in a household where going out was heavily restricted, the question is an important, non-rhetorical one. She loves outdoor activity and the euphoria of shared spaces. What she doesn’t love is the old rule that culture and celebration were meant only for after dark. So she began thinking about building and curating the kind of space and event she preferred. It took her some years to fully arrive at an answer. But when she did, it was something that felt true to her.

Her answer became a practice that is SippaAfrica. It is now, on both sides of the Atlantic, a name that carries real cultural weight.

She Turns Ideas Into Fruition

SippAfrica kicked off in Nigeria, rooted in the belief that culture, community, food, music and people deserved a space that doesn’t operate on nightlife’s terms.

She was thinking the afternoon had something to offer. She was also thinking about adults who had put down fun somewhere along the way for the responsibilities of being a grown person. Adult’s Day Out, one of its early events, handed people water guns and Ribena. It was a memorable event, almost a gift of feeling like a child again for a few hours.

By doing that, she was already proving something that would define her creative practice for years.

The years following the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped how people relate to communal experience. Lockdowns had stripped away the casual infrastructure of gathering, and when those things returned, people became more deliberate about where they spent their time and more conscious of what they needed from shared spaces. Across the UK and beyond, a new kind of cultural programming began to emerge. Daytime events, cultural brunches, immersive community gatherings. Pearl had been thinking in this direction long before it became a trend. What the post-pandemic moment did was confirm that the audience she had always believed existed was ready and waiting.

DAYFEST and Pearl’s Fingerprints

If there’s a single event that crystallises Pearl’s abilities as a cultural curator and creative producer, it is DAYFEST. It was produced in Lagos in May 2023, in broad daylight, on her own terms.

Pearl led creative direction from the ground up: the event’s identity, atmosphere it carried, the programming structure and audience experience. She also selected the DJ sets and designed the activity zones. The result was a daytime inclusive, cultural experience that brought together the community in a way that felt genuinely new without announcing itself as such.

What DAYFEST 2023 demonstrated, beyond being a successfully executed event, was that Pearl understands people want more than entertainment. They want to feel that someone thought about them, from their comfort to engagement and experience of moving through a space. The maiden Lagos edition was not a final destination. DAYFEST has since grown. It now has new arms, iterations and a presence that has crossed into the UK, where Pearl continues to shape and curate its evolution. The work she did on that May afternoon in Lagos was the foundation.

It is worth noting what DAYFEST meant within Lagos’ cultural context. Lagos has one of the most competitive and vibrant nightlife scenes on the continent. A well-attended daytime cultural event in that environment was a huge success. With DAYFEST 2023, Pearl demonstrated that there is a real appetite for cultural programming that did not require the cover of night to draw and hold a crowd.

Newcastle, a Gap and Building Again

When Pearl arrived in Newcastle, she brought her eye with her. The eye of someone trained by years of building cultural spaces to notice, almost immediately, what is missing from a room.

What was missing in Newcastle, and, she would come to understand, in much of the UK, was a platform that celebrated African and Caribbean heritage not as novelty or niche but as something worth anchoring a regular, meaningful community around.

SippAfrica UK launched as an extension of the original platform Pearl had grown in Nigeria, but the UK chapter sharpened its purpose considerably. Here, people look for continuity, a thread connected to who they were before they moved to who they are becoming. For some, that thread had frayed. For others, they never had it at all. SippAfrica UK set out to be the place where that thread could be picked back up.

Pearl’s programming reflects this well. When she organised Naija Day, it served a three-course Nigerian meal in the format of British fine dining. It presented African cuisine with elegance and fun. Another proof that Pearl’s programming can scale across cities without losing its intentionality.

Her Backbone Is Community and Culture

The backbone, Pearl insists, is community and culture. The events are how those two things become tangible.

This is also where Pearl’s work earns its place within a broader conversation about contemporary cultural production. Across the UK, a generation of diaspora-led organisers has been building through community trust, creative instinct and an understanding of their audiences. SippAfrica belongs to this movement. What distinguishes Pearl’s contribution within it is her insistence on programming that is both cultural and open. Cultural producers who centre belonging as their focus tend to build things that last long. The commercial and institutional recognition now coming SippAfrica’s way, like brand partnerships with Lemfi and MonieWorld, support from MP Chi Onwurah and Councillor Quewone Bailey-Fleet, Deputy Mayor of Hartlepool, is the acknowledgment of work that is doing something real.

Pearl’s titles read cultural curator, creative producer and event planner. In her industry, she can be likened to an architect, not of buildings, but of experience. She designs experiences that provide spaces to feel culturally recognised, to be in a room with others who share fun times and memories.

She has built those rooms in Abuja, in Lagos, in Newcastle, and now across the UK. Each iteration has been more ambitious than the last, and each is grounded in the same question she has been asking since she was young: “Why only at night? Why not now, in the light, together?”

Pearl Chukwuemeka’s answer is now definitive: there’s no reason at all.