People from all over the world come to the Oṣun-Oṣogobo festival to celebrate their religion and to celebrate and honor Oṣun, one of the Oriṣas in the Yoruba religion. An Oriṣa is one of the many different aspects of the god that the Yoruba people worship. Oṣun is sometimes referred to as “the good mother” and she has a major role in the story of the world’s creation in Yoruba texts. She is represented by water and the color yellow, and her sacred grove lies in the town of Oṣogbo. The film talks about the spread of the Yoruba religion through the slave trade and the ways African-Americans are reconnecting with their heritage through religion and pilgrimage. At the beginning of the festival there is a tradition in which 16 lamps are  lit and people dance and celebrate around them. The film shows a mix of traditionalists, non traditionalists, and people who don’t practice the Yoruba religion dancing around the lamps.
The festival is a good example of African diasporic religion due to all the different people shown attending the festival, and all their different backgrounds. Yoruba religion is practiced all over the world and all the different people who go to the festival show that the religion is not going away anytime soon. At the beginning of the film a man says, “While we may have left Africa, Africa did not leave us.” That quote speaks to the ways people worship and the immense importance of the pilgrimages that people make to Nigeria to reconnect with their roots. The two African American women who are initiated as priestesses during the film talk about rewriting their destinies, and how at the end of the initiation they felt like they were at home. Johnson’s idea of hybridity in African diasporic religions fits some of the women’s experiences growing up. The matching of Catholic saints to different Oriṣas and the different aspects of God found in Christianity and Catholicism speak to the idea of a hybrid sort of religion. While African people were enslaved it was dangerous to practice their religion, and Christianity was forced on them. Instead of giving up their religion, they matched different saints to the different Oriṣas and while they may not have been able to worship and pray in the same way they had, they still worshipped. Thompson did a good job of describing the ways in which the slaves incorporated Christianity into their religion to hide their practices: “…they managed to establish altars to their dead even while blending with the Christian world: they coded their burial mounds as ‘graves’ but studded them with symbolic objects…”(Thompson, Overture: The Concept “Altar”.)
The Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival brings people together, whether they’re practitioners of the religion or not, and to those who are it holds an incredibly special meaning. The vast diversity seen in the people attending the festival shows the ways in which the Yoruba people worship and how aspects of the religion are similar to those of other religions and yet the ways in which they worship are incredibly different. One of the women initiated as a priestess talks about how she tends to pray quietly but that it feels good to pray loudly so her prayers can be heard and how the bells force her to pray loudly. The Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival brings out aspects of African diasporic religions that are beautiful and interesting while showing how the Yoruba peoples’ rituals during the Oṣun-Oṣogbo festival affect the atmosphere in the town and how they affect all the people in the town, whether they are practitioners, traditionalists, non traditionalists, or people who are just there to celebrate Oṣun.

-Hayden