Yemoja Festival celebration 2021
Channel: One7One TV
Date: 2021-10-05

The veneration of Yemoja, goddess of the river is an annual event massively celebrated at Popo Yemoja compound, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. Concurrently, the goddess is also celebrated in different parts of the world as it is being done at Popo. The festival is a seventeen days event which had commenced in October and concluded last Sunday, the 3rd of November, 2019.
The date of the festival is not fixed, it varies with the oracle’s decision every year.
The festival begins with Ila’su (cutting of new yam) while the following days are dedicated to the worship of different gods such as Sango, Osun, Yemoja, Loogun among many others.
After the first fifteen days, activities in the last two days tagged as the grand finale intensify the spiritual essence and aesthetics of the festival. The sixteenth day is marked as the Aisun Odun ( Variety Night) where different cultural activities are displayed amidst traditional songs, chants, dances, flamboyant costumes and so on. Meanwhile, during the day, Baba Yemoja and some of his acolytes engage in specific processions to some places in the community to appease different gods. At the shrine, Sango, Ifa, Obatala and Osun devotees arrive in two and threes to pay homage at the Yemoja shrine. It is established that several of these pantheons and devotees are interconnected. Hence, one may not do without the other.