Osogbo

Osogbo grew from a settlement beside the Osun river, founded when people from the town of Ipole moved to the riverbank in search of reliable water. Tradition holds that as they cleared the ground they disturbed the goddess Osun, who agreed to protect them in return for annual offerings — a pact the town has honoured ever since in the festival each August, and which explains the grove that survived while forest elsewhere was cleared. The town's ruler carries the title Ataoja, from a phrase describing the king feeding fish from his hand in the river.

Osogbo's place in Yoruba history was fixed around 1840, when the armies of Ibadan turned back an Ilorin force here, checking the southward expansion of the Ilorin Emirate, a vassal of the Sokoto Caliphate. In the colonial period the railway from Lagos to the north passed through the town, and Osogbo became a trading centre for cocoa and a textile town, with dyeing pits worked in the old quarters.

The town's modern reputation began around 1960. The German writer Ulli Beier, in Nigeria since 1950, lived in Ede, Ilobu and Osogbo, and the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger settled in the town in 1961. Wenger became a priestess of Osun, and with local artists rebuilt the grove's decayed shrines in sculpted cement and wood, while workshops around the Mbari Mbayo club, founded in 1962 by Beier and the dramatist Duro Ladipo, trained a generation of painters and printmakers known as the Osogbo school. Osogbo became capital of the newly created Osun State in 1991, and the grove was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2005.

Osogbo is a town where the old Yoruba religion is practised openly alongside Islam and Christianity, and often by the same families. Osun, the river goddess associated with fertility, healing and fresh water, is the centre of it, and her priesthood, her shrines and the votary maid who carries the calabash to the river each August are part of civic life as much as of worship. The festival draws visitors and worshippers from abroad, among them followers of the Brazilian and Cuban religions in which Osun is honoured, carried across the Atlantic in the slave trade.

The other strand is art. The New Sacred Art movement, in which Susanne Wenger and local artists remade the grove's shrines, gave the town a body of large, strange, organic sculpture unlike anything else in West Africa. The workshops of the 1960s produced painters, printmakers and batik artists, and Nike Davies-Okundaye, who spent part of her childhood here, built her adire and textile training centres on the same tradition. Studios and dyeing yards still work in the town.

Everyday manners are Yoruba: greetings are long and precede any business, elders are greeted with a bow or by prostrating, and the Ataoja and his chiefs are treated with formality. Drumming and the talking drum accompany ceremonies, and weddings and funerals are large public occasions with matching aso ebi cloth.

Osogbo is a state capital of moderate size — about 200,000 people across the two local government areas that make up the town, and still growing as government and university work draws people in. Most are Yoruba, and Muslim and Christian communities live side by side.

The state government is the biggest employer, with its secretariat, the university and the teaching hospital, and the rest of the economy rests on trade and small workshops: cloth dyeing and tailoring, carpentry, motor repairs, printing and food processing. The farmland around the town produces cocoa, cassava, yams and maize, and much of it passes through the markets. The grove supports guides, craft sellers and hotels, especially in festival season.

Days follow the market rhythm, starting early and slowing in the afternoon heat. Most people live in low compounds with rusted iron roofs in the old quarters, or in bungalows in the newer estates spreading along the roads out of town. Power cuts are frequent and small generators are common. Delayed salaries and pensions in the state service have been a long-running grievance, and the cost of food and fuel since 2023 dominates conversation, as it does across the country.

Osogbo eats the food of the Yoruba interior. Amala, the dark swallow made from yam flour, is served with ewedu, a slippery soup of jute leaves, and gbegiri, a smooth bean soup, with a red pepper stew poured over and goat meat, beef or the cow skin called ponmo alongside. Pounded yam and eba, made from cassava grains, come with egusi made from ground melon seeds or with efo riro, a stew of leafy greens in palm oil.

The local rice of the southwest, ofada, is unpolished and slightly sour in flavour and is served wrapped in leaves with ayamase, a stew of green peppers and assorted meats. Osun's best-known snack is dodo Ikire, overripe plantain chopped with chilli and fried until almost black, which comes from the town of Ikire west of Osogbo and is sold in wrapped bundles along the roads.

Mornings bring akara, fried bean fritters, and moin moin, the same beans steamed into a pudding, often with pap made from fermented maize. Street grills sell roasted plantain called boli with groundnuts, and suya, the thin spiced beef skewers, in the evening. Palm wine is tapped in the villages around, and zobo made from dried hibiscus, kunu from millet and cold beer fill the bars along the main roads.