Across the kingdoms of Urhoboland, the year turns on festival. Bound to the rivers, creeks and farmland of the western Niger Delta, our celebrations honour the deities and the ancestors, and renew the bonds of community.
Urhobo festivals cluster in the harvest months, when farm work is at its lowest and communities can gather.
Each celebration joins three purposes: honour to the deities, veneration of the ancestors, and the renewal of community. Some festivals turn on the water spirits of a riverine homeland, others on the war heritage or founding story of a kingdom. Customs and timing differ from one kingdom to another, so the descriptions here name the kingdom each festival belongs to, and flag where sources disagree.
The best-documented of Urhobo festivals, where a riverine people honour the spirit of the waters.
Ohworu is an annual, two-day festival held at Evwreni in the southern part of Urhoboland. It venerates Ohworhu, a water spirit associated with fertility, prosperity, a bountiful catch and protection from the dangers of the rivers, a fitting devotion for a people whose life is bound to creeks and lagoons.
Its climax falls on the second and final day, known as Ohworhu-Ode, when the Eravwe Oganga, the huge beast (also rendered Eravwe Gangan), appears. It is the largest and most elaborate masquerade of the festival, carried by three performers and embodying the animal forces of the water spirit. The masquerade is shared among many southern Urhobo and Isoko communities, and it is believed to have been brought north by itinerant Urhobo fishermen from the Izon fishing camps some three hundred years ago.
The festival was documented by the scholar Perkins Foss, whose study Festival of Ohworu at Evwreni appeared in the journal African Arts in 1973 and is held today by the Smithsonian. It belongs to the same worldview set out elsewhere in this archive, where the waters, the divinities and the ancestors meet.
A festival belongs to its kingdom. Here are some of the celebrations kept across Urhoboland.
The most popular festival of the Ughelli clan, held every September over nine days. Its origin is traced to the warrior princess Irivwidide, priest of the deity Orevwo. It features dance troupes, the royal Ema dance for the Ovie, a boat regatta on the eighth day and a torch procession on the ninth.
The principal annual festival of Orogun Kingdom, held in April over seven days. It celebrates Orogun war heritage with war dances and a march to the Erose shrine for communal cleansing.
Also known as the Agbassa Juju festival, a celebration held every two years for the deity Owhurie. Participants wear scarlet war garb with blue and black body paint and perform a ceremonial cutlass dance.
A festival of the Igun people of Agbon, devoted to community unity, peace and reconciliation.
An annual festival of protection and community cohesion held in May. Young men return from a seven-day hunt, dance through the town and receive orhe, native white chalk, as a blessing.
The Edjenu is the great periodic masquerade of the Okpara people of Agbon, an extremely tall figure described in the kingdom as a ladder to heaven and in scholarship as the god of the sky, with a carrier riding at its summit through the quarters of Okpara. Its four legs stand for the four children of Agbon, Okpara, Kokori, Eku and Orhoakpor, within a kingdom of six sub-clans. It is raised only at long intervals, about once in a generation. By tradition the Edjenu may not be photographed, and so no image of it appears here.
Agbon Day is the annual celebration of Agbon Kingdom, kept both at home in Isiokolo, at the palace of the Ovie of Agbon, and by the Agbon Kingdom Union in the diaspora, with recent editions in London. It brings the sub-clans together in dance and masquerade, honours distinguished sons and daughters, and advances the development of the kingdom. The 2017 anniversary at Isiokolo was chaired by the late Chief Johnson M. Barovbe, a former President and Board of Trustees Chairman of the Urhobo Social Club Lagos, who passed in December 2021.
Festivals are where the dances of Urhoboland live. A few of the best known:
The royal song and dance performed to honour the Ovie and the titled chiefs, danced at Ughelli, Udu, Olomu, Effurun, Agbon and Uvwie, and performed within the Iyeri festival.
The celebrated satirical song and dance in which rival quarters compose exaggerated songs about one another, a poetic art of correction documented by Tanure Ojaide and G. G. Darah. More in our music and Udje section.
A dance with roots in the funeral ceremonies of the Okpe people, gathering the community in shared mourning and renewal.
A moral and social dance performed to locally made instruments, carrying teaching through gesture and song.
A graceful, spiritual stilt dance, the performer raised on stilts and moving to the rhythm of the drum.
The incarnate-spirit dance of Eghwu Kingdom, performed at the annual Odjema festival.
Our Media Gallery holds footage of the Agbassa festival and Urhobo cultural dance, shared from the @urhobonation cultural archive.
This account of Urhobo festivals is compiled from scholarly and community sources, including the work of Perkins Foss in African Arts and the Smithsonian, the Urhobo Historical Society, Urhobo Today, Wikipedia, and peer-reviewed studies of Urhobo festivals and dances. Festivals vary from kingdom to kingdom, and figures such as the interval of the Edjenu masquerade and the founding of Agbon Day are reported differently by different sources, so they are described in general terms here. Corrections and contributions from the community are warmly welcomed through our Contact page.
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