Letters

On Sango world festival

Published by

7 years ago

FROM August 16 to 25, a privileged and extravagant Sango World Festival brought together Sango adherents and cultural enthusiasts from around the world and with over 5,000 participants and thousands of spectators, the Sango World Festival has become a sustained cultural event in the annals of history, providing a tip of the iceberg into the rich age-long cultural development, civilization, diversity, and strength of the most powerful empire in Yoruba’s civilization history – The Oyo Empire.

It signifies the beginning of the Yoruba Indigenous Traditional 13-month Calendar New Year and it took place at the town of Sango, where the sacred Koso Temple, where it is believed that Sango disappeared, is situated.

In the indigenous calendar, one year has 13 months, a month has 28 days and a week has four days. The 28 days monthly circle is called Jakuta Oloyin. The festival starts with sacred rites by Mogba Koso and climaxes with the annual Idaasa Erindinlogun divination cast for the Alaafin of Oyo, all adherents of Orisa, Yoruba land and the world. Idaasa is divided into 16 ancient numerical categories known as Onka Agba, each accumulating unaccountable narrative oral forms of families and towns history, which are recorded in verses. It also forms Yoruba’s historical, cultural, and mythological compendium.

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This great institution of checks and balances have endured from ages, pioneering the cabinet system of the administration of justice, law, peace and social order since the time of Oranmiyan, Baba Oba and founder of Oyo Empire.

Oyo Empire had sustainably been in the forefront of the protection of the identities of the Yoruba race through sustained practise of Yoruba civilization and origins in its promotion of language, fashion, food, culture, traditions and specialised arts and craft knowledge.

Our society began to snowball into backwardness against its own value system, when our identities witnessed being violated because of the dearth of knowledge in its development and continued practise and propagation, while we simultaneously pay endless prizes for this disrespect to our identities through anti social infractions like drug abuse, desperate migration leading to modern slave and labour trade, imported HIV and AIDS, terrorism, homosexuality, transgender, bleaching, indecent dressing and many other vices which were abominations and alien to us. These anti-social doctrines represent false knowledge, derailing our world formerly driven by knowledge to a world merely driven by information, with attendant effects more dangerous than ignorance itself.

Finally, as His Imperial Majesty, Oba Adeyemi III, has set the cultural ball rolling, the ball is in our court to either prioritise education in the physical, metaphysical, scientific and spiritual knowledge in order to flourish our identities or we ignore education and lose our identities.