The African Diaspora has been defined by many, and in many different ways. The definition that I find that connects with the Oṣun-Oṣogbo Festival best though, would be the how Johnson defines it in Chapter 30, “Religions of the African Diaspora” article we were given to read. “Diasporic religions are composed on the hand out of memories about space- places of origin, about the distances traversed from them since a time of exile, and the physical or ritual returns imagined, […] diasporic religious agents recollect the past through territorial and temporal ways of seeing, and from particular sites.” This idea of the rituals returns is clear in the video as the Oṣun-Oṣogbo Festival occurs every year in August and hundreds of thousands of people make the trip to return to Africa and to Oṣogbo for the festivities. The women in the film who came to Africa to be initiated as priestesses of the Yoruba religion said that coming back felt like they were taking back all that had been taken from them when their ancestors had been taken away from their homeland, and from their religion, where they were forced to hide their religion and keep it veiled behind Catholicism and Christian ideas during slavery. In the film they talked about how many of the traditions haven’t changed in hundreds of years, and that most of them are survived even through the toll that the African Slave trade took on Nigeria and the people from there. They kept the memories of Africa and these religions alive though which is a key part of being a diasporic religion, because they are composed of these memories, it’s the memories that keep the religion alive in the population. This is such an important part of diasporic religions, that the whole festival is based off of a memory. That memory being the one of how the goddess Oṣun became the patron orisha of Oṣogbo, and the reason being, because the first king of Oṣogbo chopped down a tree in Oṣun’s Sacred grove, breaking her personal dye pots, and in an attempt to fix what he had done and to forge this relationship between his kingdom and the goddess, promised her sacrifices and the festival every August. I think this film gave me a better understanding into the diasporic religions and to the Yoruba religions, because being able to see part of the festival gave me a better understanding of how large of a religion it actually is, I wasn’t aware that it was in the top 10 largest religions, so to see how many people traveled to come participate in this festival, and knowing from the article that we read recently about the festival celebrating Oṣun in Brazil really helped me to understand just how large of a religion it really is. As well as showing how popular of a religion it is, the film also showed us more into the intimate parts of the religion. When we saw Bruce Feiler, the host of the film go in and speak with the priest and watch a bit of a ritual, or when we got a look into the process of how the young girl was chosen to carry the sacrifices for Oṣun down to the river, we got to actually see a very important part of the religion that we normally do not get to see in the articles that we read.

–Sam Brady