SHARO FESTIVAL: CULTURE OR TORTURE

 

By Iloh Mmesoma

Nigeria is a country encapsulating diverse cultures and traditions dating as far back as the pre colonial era. These cultures come in variants and are strongly attached to ones tribe, ethnicity or race.

The Sharo festival is however one of the rarely spoken culture in Nigeria. It is also referred to as Shadi and is celebrated among the Jafun Fulani. Not all Fulani nomadic groups observe this ceremony or insist on it before a young man may marry. For some it is merrily a sport, indulged in for its own sake.
The Sharo/Shadi is a proof of strength and endurance for the Jafun youths because its participants are expected to undergo severe flogging in public without backing out.

The festival holds twice a year, during the dry season guinea com harvest and Muslim festival of Id-el-kabir. Occasionally it is held during marriages, naming ceremony of the firstborn child of a renowned Sharo exponent, to honor a chief, or as a contest between clans.

The participants are escorted by girls to the event venue and led into a ring formed by spectators, their chests exposed. They are not allowed to wear shirts or cover the upper part of their bodies.

The festival proceeds with lively drumming, singing, cheers and self-praises from both competitors and challengers. The flogging process begins when the excitement is at its peak. The challenger raises his whip and flogs his opponent. His opponent must endure this without flinching or expressing a sign of pain, lest he be branded a coward and unfit for manhood.
 

The excruciating pain is however not bearable by every participant.This at times leaves permanent scars on their bodies. Those who do endure to the end are certified mature and free to choose a girl to marry.

The Shar festival like any other game has its own referee charged with the responsibility of ensuring that the strokes are rightly deposited and there is fair flogging of the opponent.

Surrounded by family members, friends and well wishers, the opponent is motivated with their support and their readiness to offer gifts and other bounties for him if he was able to withstand the pain till the end of the proceedings.

It is worthy of note that sometimes the opponents chants some incantations, use charm or pain resistant drug to fortify them in the course of the flogging. All of these do not matter in the festival as the only paramount interest of observers is the ability of the victim to withstand the pain without any show of pain but to ask for more of the whips.

Mostly, the severe floggings leave some indelible scars on the victims despite the fact that the Fulani have herbal medicines that heal the wound fairly quickly. These scars are later displayed as a mark of bravery and sign for the successful transition to manhood.

At the end of the rite of passage marked by Sharo, the brave and enduring once young boy who s now a man is allowed to marry his choice from the spinsters in the clan. With the adherence of Islamic religion, he can marry up to four wives provided he has the ability to cater for them all.

Despite the fact that the Fulani is a nomadic tribe that moves around in the search for pastorals for their herds, they are no less cultured that any other major tribes in Africa. Their socialization process is gender specific where the females join their mothers in the kitchen and take care of chores at home. The male on the other hand rear cattle and protect the family.

The Fulani culture over the years has been diffused with Islamic tradition leaving them with little practices that survived the cultural mix. One of such predominant practice is the Sharo festival owing to its importance to the Fulfulde speaking people. Little wonder, why today the one unique thing people only remembers the Fulani culture which is the Sharo festival that has been preserved for centuries.