Baba Is Dead: Are We Burying Nigeria’s Memory With Him? -By Prince Charles Dickson PhD

Once upon a time, there was a girl.

One day she bought a book titled “How to Communicate with Fools.” She skipped the preface and immediately started reading.

And it’s a pity she skipped it. Because in the preface, it says that you might not need to communicate with fools at all. 

There is something painfully Nigerian about that little joke. We are often so eager to get to the loud part that we skip the preface. We want the concert but not the culture that produced the rhythm; the costume but not the cosmology; the tourist photograph but not the history; the trending word but not the mother tongue in which our grandparents once explained the world.

Then Baba died.

Baba was the famous tortoise at the palace of the Alaafin of Oyo, said in palace oral history to have lived for about 420 years. That extraordinary age has not been scientifically verified, and intellectual honesty requires that qualification. But the cultural meaning of Baba does not depend on a laboratory certificate. The palace says the tortoise was brought from Oyo-Ile, was cared for by successive Alaafins and had become part of the oral history and tourist memory of the kingdom.

When Baba died in September 2026, the story made the newspapers. Yet in the copy before me, this supposed 420-year-old witness to Yoruba history occupied one modest column. No national pause. No great conversation about what had passed with him. The republic moved on.

And that, perhaps, is the real story.

A creature described as a living bridge across generations died, and Nigeria barely looked up from its phone.

We should.

The death of Baba is a useful metaphor for a country in danger of becoming culturally forgetful while remaining spectacularly entertained. Nigeria is not short of culture. We are drowning in it. What we are increasingly short of is transmission. A culture can survive invasion, migration, colonialism and war; what it struggles to survive is a generation that no longer thinks it is worth teaching to its children.

Look northward.

The Durbar remains one of the great public theatres of Nigerian heritage, a collision of horsemanship, royal authority, textiles, music, craft, religion and community memory. Ilorin staged its Grand Durbar again in 2026, continuing an increasingly visible cultural tradition.  In Kano, however, the planned Eid-el-Kabir Durbar activities were suspended amid security concerns and the unresolved dispute surrounding the emirate.  In Borno, a Grand Durbar and cultural exhibition were held in Maiduguri in January 2026 as part of a tourism and investment showcase.

These examples tell us something important: the Durbar is not dead, but neither is it invulnerable.

Security, political disputes, funding and institutional instability can interrupt traditions that took generations to build.

The same sobering lesson sits on the Plateau. Nzem Berom and Pusdung remain important markers of Berom and Ngas cultural identity. Plateau State itself lists both among its major cultural festivals.  Yet the 2026 editions of both were postponed because of insecurity.

That is not cultural indifference. Communities cannot dance convincingly while counting their dead. Conflict deserves that exception.

But insecurity also teaches a harder lesson: when a festival misses one year, memory usually survives. When it misses many years, the young eventually inherit photographs instead of practice.

And then there is Ijebuland.

Ojude Oba has demonstrated what happens when heritage learns to occupy the modern attention economy without completely surrendering its soul. The festival retains its regberegbe age-grade system, royal homage, fashion, music and communal reunion while attaining enormous national visibility.

Lagos has also offered an intriguing counterexample. The Fanti Carnival, rooted in the Afro-Brazilian heritage of Lagos Island, returned prominently in 2026 with community participation and institutional support.

These are not arguments for turning every ancestral festival into a sponsored catwalk where the ancestors require VIP wristbands.

They are evidence that tradition does not have to choose between dignity and visibility.

Meanwhile, popular culture has mastered the machinery of attention.

Detty December is no longer merely slang. It has become an economic season, a tourism phenomenon and an increasingly organised entertainment ecosystem. The 2026 Detty December Fest is scheduled across thirteen days in Lagos, built around major music, nightlife, food, fashion and entertainment programming.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

Afrobeats is Nigerian culture too. Youth culture is culture. Nightlife is culture. Nobody needs to confiscate the DJ’s laptop and replace it with a talking drum.

The problem begins when the new becomes organised, marketed, funded and monetised while the old is left to survive on sentiment.

A nation can learn the chorus of the latest hit in three days and lose the language of its grandmother in one generation.

That is not rhetorical exaggeration. UNESCO warns that around 40 per cent of the world’s languages are at risk of disappearing, noting that language loss carries with it oral traditions, knowledge systems, histories and distinctive ways of understanding the world. Its 2026 work on Indigenous languages again emphasises intergenerational transmission, particularly the role of young people in keeping languages alive.

Festivals and languages are therefore not separate files in the cabinet of culture.

They are twins.

A festival is a language wearing clothes and moving in public.

The songs, invocations, jokes, praise names, proverbs, greetings, drum codes, food names and ritual vocabulary often carry meanings that English cannot fully transport. When the festival thins out, the language loses a stage. When the language disappears, the festival may remain colourful, but something inside it has gone mute.

So where are the institutions responsible for cultural preservation?

Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy said in May 2026 that the long-running review of the National Policy on Culture was almost completed, following decades in which the old framework remained the central reference point.  That is an institutional development worth noting. But a policy document by itself cannot teach a child her grandmother’s language or remember the name of a disappearing dance.

Cultural survival happens much farther down the road from Abuja.

It happens in state ministries, local governments, traditional councils, museums, universities, schools, radio stations, community associations, family compounds and, increasingly, on phones.

So the accountability questions should become uncomfortable.

Which states possess a living register of their festivals, languages, oral historians, master craftsmen and endangered traditions? Where are the digital archives that a 15-year-old can actually find without conducting archaeological excavation on a government website? How much cultural history enters our schools beyond the obligatory Cultural and Creative Arts examination?

How many local radio stations still carry storytelling, proverbs, drama and serious programming in minority languages? How many tourism plans treat community festivals as cultural infrastructure rather than occasions for politicians, dignitaries and assorted chairmen of organising committees to sit beneath canopies and give speeches longer than the festival itself?

And where are our universities in the urgent work of recording vocabularies, oral histories, songs, rituals and performance traditions before the custodians of those traditions disappear?

We do not need another glossy brochure proclaiming Nigeria’s cultural diversity while the actual songs, idioms, dances, names and memories disappear behind the brochure.

Perhaps Baba the tortoise understood something we do not.

Survival is not speed. It is continuity.

Whether one accepts 420 years as literal chronology or treats it carefully as palace oral history, Baba’s symbolic force remains immense. He survived because, generation after generation, somebody kept feeding him.

Culture works remarkably similarly.

It must be fed by use. By memory. By teaching. By documentation. By performance. By curiosity. By children asking questions and elders being given the dignity, audience and time to answer them.

Detty December can thrive.

Ojude Oba can trend.

The Durbar can gallop.

Nzem Berom can drum again when security permits.

Pusdung can gather its people.

Fanti can dance through Lagos.

None needs to defeat the other.

The enemy is not modernity. The enemy is amnesia.

And cultural amnesia is a particularly cruel disease because, by the time a people finally realise what they have forgotten, there may be nobody left who remembers how to teach it back.

Baba has been buried, Our memory does not have to be—May Nigeria win