Custom · Present day, with older traditions
Image: Nike Davies-Okundaye Art & Gallery Sight at Ogidi-Ijumu, Kogi State.jpg — Adamsaddam, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Among Kogi's rocky hills, Ogidi's women bring their art into a yearly celebration of food, work and coming home.
Ogidi, in Ijumu, Kogi State, sits among great bald hills of grey granite-like rock. It is an Okun Yoruba town, and the rocks are what strangers notice first.
But Ogidi's people would point you somewhere else: to the cloth. The town has long been known for its arts and crafts, and above all for women's work, dyeing, weaving and trading. A tourism study of Kogi State put Ogidi's rocks and its craft industry side by side, as one attraction.
Once a year the town comes home. Ogidi Day grew out of the New Yam Festival. Farmers present the first yams of the season, and every group in the town comes out to honour the king. Sons and daughters who live in Lagos and Abuja come back. There is music and dancing in the streets.
In a photograph from the 2019 festival, a group of women hold up a length of indigo adire cloth between them, in patterned clothes they made themselves. That is the festival in one picture: the women showing what their hands can do.
Ogidi's most famous daughter is the textile artist Nike Davies-Okundaye, whose galleries in Lagos and Abuja draw visitors from all over the world. She has spent years training women in textiles and art. At the 2019 festival people gathered for food at her gallery back in her home town.
The festival is still going strong. In 2026 Kogi's commissioner for culture and tourism came, praised the town for keeping it up year after year, and promised the state's support.
Most hidden stories are about lost kingdoms. Ogidi's isn't lost. Come at festival time, look up at the rocks, then look at the cloth.
