In the heat of August, tens of thousands of people crowd the streets of Osogbo, Nigeria where they plan to spend the next 12 days honoring their most important Orisha, the goddess Osun. Osun offers grace to Osogbo and ensures their lives are well as long as the people honor her and her Sacred Grove once a year. The beauty and intensity of this festival is explored by Bruce Feiler in “Osun-Osogbo” an episode of a documentary series called  “Sacred Journeys”. Feiler takes you into the heart of Osogbo to show the world how this city honors their goddess from lamp lighting ceremonies to animal sacrifice. After Feiler’s twelve day journey is over and the film has ended it is clear that the Osun-Osogbo festival is an example of the African diaspora with the memories that shape this culture, the distanced covered from a time of exile, and thousands of people returning to Osogbo every year.

The African diaspora is an idea that there are communities around the world that came from descendants of the slaves taken from Africa. Paul Christopher Johnson’s quote from his writing “Religions of the African Diaspora” best connects this idea to the Osun-Osogbo festival, “Diasporic religions are composed on the one hand out of memories about space-places of origins, about the distance traversed from them since a time of exile, and physical or ritual returns…” Two women whose journey of becoming Yoruba priestess’ in the film is the most accurate example on how this festival represents the African diaspora.

The two women who traveled to Osogbo with Bruce Feiler tell him what life was like growing up. They both practiced the same religion depicted in the festival but in the Americas; their only real connection to the Yoruba people was through memories of their families. This example from the film is a key representation of the African diaspora because the Yoruba traditions were kept alive in small communities across the world through memories from their African descendants passed down from generation to generation.

Not only did the women practice their religion from memories passed down, but they understood how their small religious community in the Americas came to be. During the slave trade most slaves came from the coast of Nigeria, bringing their culture with them. The forced journey corresponds with Johnson’s idea of the African diaspora, “…the distance traversed from them since a time of exile…”. This idea made the two soon-to-be Yoruba priestess’ and many others feel the need to come back to the festival  to experience what was taken from them and many other generations. Their physical returns due to a past time of exile truly captures the African diaspora in the Osun-Osogbo festival.

While the idea of the African diaspora is not one known to everywhere this is definitely a film worth watching. It is truly amazing to see a culture that has been spread all over the world stay connected through memories, which in turn gives them the desire to return to the heart of their culture, the Osun-Osogbo festival.