This article focuses on Òṣogbo, an annual festival of the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria. In exploring the sociality and performativity of the festival, the article discusses the ways in which music and song-texts are deployed to articulate social and political agendas and power relations as shaped within the context of recent democratic politics in Nigeria. Ethnographic material as well as musical examples provide the basis for analysing how this religious festival is enacted responsively to the expanding political topography of institutional power in Nigeria, while remaining an important forum for the celebration of ancestral and religious identities.
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