The cultural premium on a decent burial for the departed will receive another solemn testimony in Ibadan, South-western Nigeria November 2nd, 2018 when the family of the late Pa Bright Jacob Jatto celebrates his transition to the great beyond. It will be an unprecedented mixture of cultures, bringing Edo and Yoruba together and speaking to the harmonious face of the national question in Nigeria. While Pa Bright Jatto comes from the Edo stock and was a community leader there, he lived and worked for most of his life in Ibadan where he was also a community leader. His burial in Ibadan is a concession to his identity as constituted by the convergence instead of clash of two of Nigeria’s most predominant cultural groups.
The Oba of Benin
The Olubadan of Ibadan
Although it is a Christian burial, culture is what Samuel Huntington isolates as the modernism-resistant strain that defines a civilisation. At 95, his burial is appropriately a celebration of life as invoked in the invite. Instructively, the burial will stretch from November 1st to 3rd, involving series of rites of passage. His life cut across business, a career with a major multinational corporation in their bases in Zaria and Ibadan and communal leadership in Ibadan for a long time.
