Osun Festival: Drumbeats in Osogbo

Drummers performing energetically at Osun Osogbo Festival 2014. Osun Osogbo is a ten to fourteen-day festival held in August of each year. It culminates in a massive procession to the Osun Grove where the king, the Ataoja of Osogbo, conducts rituals with the sacred objects carried by the Arugba (Priestess and Votary Maid) to the Osun Shrine. The Osun Festival in the Groves had dwindled in size to only a very small number of traditionalists prior to the arrival of Susanne Wenger in 1950 and the revitalization of the Shrines by the New Sacred Art Movement, which Wenger founded. Over the years the Festival has grown to become the largest and most important Festival in Yorubaland, indeed in the whole of Nigeria. The numbers are not formally recorded but it is said that tens of thousands of people join in the annual procession each year. Hundreds of devotees make the pilgrimage yearly from foreign countries. Many of these come from South America and the Caribbean where Yoruba religious traditions were passed down to the descendants of slaves taken from Yorubaland, including Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad and Tobago. African Americans also come to Nigeria, and particularly Osogbo in increasing numbers, as interest in their African heritage and traditions grows.