Osun Festival: Head of Cowries

Female devotee is shown with a lowered face mask and the trademark hairstyle of Osun followers, adorned with cowries. Photographed during the festival held in 2020, year of the Coronavirus pandemic, when the festival was staged low-key, on a much smaller scale and with no visitors from outside. This is a festival usually attended by thousands, with many international visitors from the African Diaspora in attendance. 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.