Soyinka wants Isese culture entrenched, amidst backlash from Muslims

Professor Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate, has stated that nothing will weaken the Isese tradition and that it is here to stay.

He said this while pointing out that Isese had always existed alongside humans and always will.

Soyinka revealed this on Friday at a public discussion hosted at the Kongi’s Harvest Art Gallery on Freedom Way in Lagos State.

Isese Day is observed in states in the South-West, but it has caused some controversy, particularly in Ilorin, Kwara State, where Yeye Ajesikemi Olatunji, an Osun priestess who planned to observe the day on August 20, was verbally attacked and ordered by the Emir of Ilorin, Mallam Abdulazeez Arowona, and other Muslim adherents not to do so.

Mallam Abdulazeez Arowona, the emir’s spokesman, said in a statement that the Ilorin Emirate had never engaged in what he called “idolatry activities” in the past.

Adegbola Abdulazeez, commonly known as Talolorun (Who is God), a well-known Ilorin Isese supporter and activist who led the charge for Isese recognition in the state, was imprisoned and arrested for alleged slander.

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Since then, he has been accused of “insulting the Emir of Ilorin among other offences” in court.

Speaking on the situation, Soyinka cautioned that nobody deserves to be detained for agitating for their religious beliefs.

He said, “It transcends religion since it calls to what is innate to all sentient beings, those strange advocates of freedom who, paradoxically, nonetheless persist in fashioning chains for themselves and for their fellow beings.

“Isese liberates. It is an expression of the collective human spirit, its enveloping, compassionate accommodation of human experience, yet one that strives towards the seemingly inaccessible, intuitively felt as an elevating dimension of one’s material estate.

“Isese is a path, not a destination, a seizure yet a pursuit of what we experience as the inner quest for ultimate illumination. Isese does not conclude, and neither does it exclude. It does not diminish, rather, it enlarges. It teaches the community to embrace, explore, and adjust.

“Isese promotes, as foundational consciousness, gratitude for, and sanctity of human life. It repudiates the supremacist claim of any structure of spirituality over another. Content with the pursuit of inner serenity, which is the climax of, and extraction from celebration, Isese does not seek to exercise power. All true religions know that celebration is a prelude to community equilibrium,” he said.

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