Festivals. African festivals integrate instrumental music, song, dance, mime, costuming, fine arts, and narrative performances. Preparations for a festival employ the talents of skilled artists and craftspeople. Carvers, smiths, weavers, cultural historians, poets, musicians, and dancers carefully plan annual celebrations and ritual performances. Most festivals occur over several days and offer an array of sacred and secular events at several venues. Festivals often attract people who have married outside their community, providing an occasion for families to reunite and for the ruler and his extensive organization to reconnect with his constituency. In a ritual context, festivals are a time of communal and individual healing, spiritual renewal, thanksgiving, and societal cleansing. Archaeological evidence, as well as the chronicles of the earliest Arab and European travelers, document that West African societies have engaged in these forms of spectacle for hundreds of years. Although scholars cannot...