Collection
How We Celebrate
A river festival, a forest festival and a month of carnival — and what each one costs the town that holds it.
Nigeria's great festivals are reported as spectacle, which they are. They are also budgets, employment schemes, arguments about land and, in at least one case, a fishery under real pressure. Same events, looked at from the town rather than the parade route.
- DispatchArgungu12.74°N 4.53°E
The festival that depends on a river that keeps failing
Argungu is famous for one morning a year. The rest of the year is a town watching the water table.
- Photo essayOsogbo7.78°N 4.54°E
The forest that was never allowed to be cleared
The Osun-Osogbo grove survived because clearing it was forbidden, and became a UNESCO site by accident of that prohibition.
- DispatchCalabar4.98°N 8.34°E
What a month of carnival is actually worth
Calabar stages the largest street festival in Africa every December. The rest of the year is the harder question.
