Slow love in a cut-throat world
It often feels like everyone's out for themselves – but in Shao, matrimonial rites unite more than just the newly wed.
Words and photos: Sogo Oladele

Shao is a quiet, unassuming town nestled between rocky mountains in northern Nigeria. It’s not well known outside Kwara State. We visited for its annual mass wedding festival, an enduring gentle rebellion against modern individualism.
Life in Shao moves slowly and tradition shifts ever slower, a stillness that has allowed this tradition to survive for generations. The festival itself is unhurried, often stretching over three days of rituals that blend several elements of Yoruba wedding culture. In ẹkún ìyàwó, the brides perform poetry to thank their parents and seek blessings for their new life as they transition from their birth families to their husband’s.
Many Yoruba cultural expressions at Shao’s mass wedding have been replaced by marriage traditions from Abrahamic religions or diluted for modern tastes. At this year’s festival, something beyond the rituals, colourful aṣọ-oke fabric, and the brides’ blue umbrellas, made the case for returning to our roots.
In the current Nigerian economy, in which the cost of basics is out of many people’s reach, planning a wedding is an extreme sport. As 40 brides beam with joy as they participate in the mass wedding, the wisdom of this communal approach was apparent.
Here, the burden of planning a wedding is shared by the entire community, not borne by a single family.
The festival is rooted in local Yoruba mythology about a single-breasted woman who met a hunter, Olarele, at a river near the town. The mysterious woman, known as Awon is believed to be the sister of Osun, another famous river goddess. Awon then visited the town, which welcomed her with open arms. To repay the community’s kindness, she promised to protect its people and make them fertile, asking that they set aside a day each year on which to wed every woman of marriageable age.
This year’s celebration felt particularly magnetic for being an eruption of collective joy in northern Nigeria, which is more often the subject of news reports on violence. Just a few weeks before the festival, armed bandits had attacked the Oke-Ode community in another small and largely unknown town about 77km away from Shao. The fear lingers across Kwara. Meanwhile, the people of Shao celebrate love in community, honouring Awon and praying she shelters them as Abuja slowly responds to the violence marching to their doorstep.













This makes for joyful reading! What beautiful portraits! Were the grooms too shy to be photographed, I wonder? May the newly weds be ever blessed...