(By
Pius Adesanmi) - Live And Let Live
If you are Yoruba and you are older than the Facebook or Twitter
generation of Nigerians, if you are struggling to cope with expressions such as
LOL (laugh out loud) , LMAO (laugh my ass off) OMG (Oh my God), and 9ja (Naija)
in emails and texts you receive daily from Nigerians in their teens and
twenties, chances are you grew up in a village in Yoruba land where life is
suffused in culture, tradition, and a panoply of ancestral rituals and
spiritual observances, all instances of man shaping order out of primordial
chaos.
Chances are, growing up, you partook – as audience or celebrant–
in a very colourful tapestry of ancestral liturgies: Ogun festival, Sango
festival, Imole festival, Egungun festival, and, of course, Oro festival, the
fear of which is the beginning of wisdom for Yoruba women.
Chances are you enjoyed the atmospherics of these observances,
partook of propitiatory offal, sang, and danced to a host of inspirational
choruses and processionals welcoming the ancestors and the orishas into the
realm of unworthy mortals at each spiritual enactment.
