Legend · Legend c.1350; held every year
Image: Oba Ajibade Gbadegesin Ogunoye III during Igogo 2020 Festival.jpg — Gabriel Fadamitan, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Every September the Olowo of Owo plaits his hair and dresses like a woman, to honour a queen who walked away.
Long ago in Owo, so the story goes, the king went hunting. His name was Rerengejen, and he was the Olowo, the ruler of Owo, in what is now Ondo State. Somewhere out in the bush he met a woman so beautiful that he could not leave without her. The people who keep this story say she was not entirely human. A museum officer at the National Museum in Owo described her to the Daily Trust as part spirit and part human. Others simply call her an orisha, a goddess, who came to live as a wife in a king's house. Her name was Oronsen.
She agreed to marry him, but she came with conditions. There were things that must never be done in her presence, and she named them plainly. One telling, the one written down on Wikipedia, lists them: nobody was to grind okra for stew where she could see it, nobody was to pour water into the yard, and nobody coming home from the farm was to throw a load of firewood down in front of her. The king warned his other wives to respect these rules. For a while they did, and Oronsen became the woman he loved most. Under her, people say, the king and his house grew rich.
You can probably guess what happened next. The other wives grew jealous of the newcomer who had taken first place in the king's heart. One day, while the king was away from the palace, they did the forbidden things on purpose, one after another, right in front of her. Oronsen was so hurt that she walked out of the palace and out of the town. The king sent people after her, and they found her and begged her to come home. She refused. In one version she slipped away from them into a forest called Igbo Oluwa, leaving her head ties behind at a place called Ugbo Laja, and both places are sacred today. In another, she turned into a tree. Either way, she never came back. But before she went, she left the king a promise. If he and every king after him held a festival for her each year, and kept her rules, she would bless and protect the kingdom for ever.
That promise is still being kept. Every year, usually in September, Owo holds the Igogo festival, and it runs for seventeen days. It opens with a long procession called Upeli, led by the chiefs of Iloro quarter, and it is also the season when the new yams are celebrated. In 2023, according to the New Telegraph, the festival began on 7 September with the Upeli procession and closed on 2 October, when a drum called Olusorope was finally beaten to tell everyone they could play their own drums again.
That is the first thing you notice about Igogo. There are no drums. For the whole festival nobody in Owo may beat one, because Oronsen did not want them. Guns may not be fired either. Instead, the town fills with the sound of metal gongs, agogo, and the Owo way of saying agogo is igogo, which is where the festival gets its name. When the Olowo comes out to dance, no woman may keep her head tie on and no man may wear his cap.
Then there is the dressing up. To honour Oronsen, the Olowo plaits his hair the way she did and wears a beaded blouse and wrapper, with coral beads at his neck. His high chiefs do the same. A Daily Trust reporter who went to Owo in 2015 and again in 2017 described the king coming out of the palace in a red beaded gown, his greying hair simply but richly plaited, two senior chiefs holding him by the arms as he walked and letting go each time he turned to dance. He stopped at set spots along the way, beat the gong he carried, danced, and moved on, with young men holding big white parasols over him. All around him, ordinary men had done their hair like women, in braids, wigs and weave-ons, with earrings and wrappers, and chiefs went from house to house dancing, while the people inside came out to dance with them and hand over gifts.
So when did all this begin? Nobody can say for sure. People in Owo speak of the festival being seven or eight hundred years old, and the dates given for Rerengejen's reign do not agree. The New Telegraph gives 1350 to 1356 in one paragraph and 1340 to 1346 in another, and calls him the 13th Olowo, while the museum officer quoted by the Daily Trust calls him the ninth. With no written records from that time, Oronsen herself belongs to legend. The festival, though, is as real as the palace it starts from, and you can stand in the crowd and watch it.
What makes Igogo so moving is what it says. Here is a powerful king, in a town where men usually hold the power, dressing like the wife who was wronged in his house, keeping her rules and dancing for her every single year. A lecturer and prince of Owo, Olaleke Olateru Olagbegi, put it beautifully to the Daily Trust. He said people compare Igogo with the Taj Mahal, the tomb an Indian emperor built for his late wife, but the Taj Mahal is stone and never changes, while Igogo moves and is danced again every year, so that ten years of it give you ten different memories.
Like any living thing, it has its quarrels. In 2023 the Ojomoluda of Ijebu-Owo, head of the senior kingmakers, stayed away for the first time, after his people objected to the festival being taken into their quarter. The present Olowo, Oba Ajibade Gbadegesin Ogunoye III, who took the throne in 2019, wants it to grow into a festival the whole world comes to see. But at its heart it is still the same simple thing: a king with plaited hair, beating a gong in the silence where the drums should be, remembering a queen who walked away.
