LAP Lambert Academic Publishing Yoruba Masquerade: AJIA MONGARA and A broad-based Ancestral Worship

Àjíà Mόngàra is a Yoruba (Òyó) masquerade with complex of activities; a multimedia art, costume, dance, music, audience and entourage spiced with spirituality; an adjudicator masquerade and a combatant during inter-tribal wars. It entertains and communicates with the spirit world to perform spiritual tasks: venerates the ancestors to protect and nurture its community. Among the Yoruba, physical death is not the end of life but a transitional and transmuted phase of life. Good people who died at ripe old age become ancestors placated through re-enactment of Egúngún tradition. Function of ‘life-after death’ among the Yoruba gives essence to the creation of masquerades. This book compensates for clarity, omissions and distortions in other Yoruba-Egúngún studies with ancestral veneration. Approximate truth about ancestral veneration is explicated by Àjíà Masquerade suffice readers who want to understand ancestral veneration among the Yoruba. It explicates rapidity of change in contemporary times that permeated many indigenous cultures, especially Yoruba. Above all, it is better if indigene of cultures are writers of their heritage: the “fourth dimension” in some write-ups is missing.