Everything around Osogbo that could be farmed has been farmed. The grove on the edge of town is the exception, and it is the exception for a straightforward reason: cutting it was forbidden, and the prohibition held.
From the 1950s Susanne Wenger, an Austrian artist who settled in Osogbo, worked with Nigerian sculptors to rebuild and extend the shrines. The result is a body of modernist sculpture inside a sacred forest, which sounds like a collision and is not one.
The annual festival brings the diaspora home in numbers few Nigerian events match. For two weeks the town is fuller than it can comfortably hold, which the town appears to regard as the correct state of affairs.
