‘I DID NOT RECORD OLOOLU’: WASILAT BREAKS SILENCE OVER VIRAL IBADAN MASQUERADE SCARE

By Aiyepola Abayomi

IBADAN, OYO STATE

A young content creator at the centre of a viral scare tied to Ibadan’s most feared masquerade has spoken publicly for the first time, denying that she filmed the sacred Oloolu, and insisting that reports of her death were false. Her name is Wasilat, and her account, given on Monday, August 3, 2026, complicates a story that had already spread across social media platforms in the days before.

WHAT WASILAT SAYS HAPPENED

Speaking by telephone on Ibi Aye N Lo, a programme on Lagelu FM hosted by Adesoye Omotosho, Wasilat walked through the events of the previous Thursday. She said she had gone to her family’s shop in the Oremeji area of Ibadan on an impulse, despite having no earlier plan to leave home that day. While standing outside the shop, she noticed a crowd moving past, along with a security vehicle belonging to Amotekun, the South West’s regional security outfit.

She maintained that the true Oloolu masquerade never passed through that particular route; what she recorded and posted online, she said, was something else entirely, footage that nonetheless triggered immediate alarm in the comment section, with viewers urging her to take it down.

“I am not dead. I did not capture the Oloolu masquerade. May I not be implicated,” she said on air, pushing back directly against the version of events that had already reached thousands of viewers before she could respond.

THE PALACE VERSION

Chief Adeola Oloko, spokesperson for the Olubadan of Ibadanland, offered a version that both supports and softens the panic surrounding Wasilat’s video.

According to Chief Oloko, she did not film Oloolu itself but rather Alawo Oloolu, a separate figure connected to the same tradition; the confusion, he said, was traced back to the Mogaji of the Oloolu compound, who confirmed that a woman mistook Alawo for the real masquerade and filmed it on the street.

Chief Oloko added that after the clip went online, Wasilat reportedly began experiencing sudden health complications, which her family attributed to the breach and which prompted them to seek out the custodians of the Oloolu tradition for intervention.

“Women are not supposed to see Oloolu, but out of curiosity, she disobeyed,” Oloko said, describing the episode as a case of an old instruction being ignored rather than deliberate disrespect.

WHY THE FEAR RUNS SO DEEP

To understand why a single video could set off cleansing rites and citywide rumour, it helps to look at what Oloolu actually represents in Ibadan.

Unlike most Egungun masquerades, which perform for entertainment during festival season, Oloolu is treated as an enforcer of ancestral authority, believed to carry real supernatural consequence for anyone who breaks the taboos around him.

Oral history traces his origin to a war fought at Ogbagi in present-day Ondo State, where an Ibadan warrior named Ayorinde Aje is said to have defeated a fearsome war spirit and brought its regalia, including a skull that still crowns the masquerade’s costume, back to Ibadan as a war trophy.

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Since then, the Oloolu masquerade has emerged annually in July as part of the city’s Egungun festival, moving through areas such as Popo-Yemoja, Beere and Oja’ba, with strict rules attached to the outing: women are forbidden from setting eyes on him, and even the man who bears the costume is barred from certain domestic and physical acts in the weeks before he appears.

This year’s outing was scheduled for July 27, 2026, placing Wasilat’s Thursday encounter squarely within the festival window when public anxiety around the tradition runs highest.

A TRADITION UNCHANGED BY MODERN NIGERIA

Academic research on the festival, including a study published through Afribary, has found that the taboos surrounding Oloolu have remained largely untouched by decades of religious change, urban growth and new technology in Ibadan, a city of well over three million people today.

That resistance to change is precisely what collided with a smartphone and a TikTok upload last Thursday: an old prohibition, built for a world without cameras, meeting a platform built entirely around them.

WHERE THINGS STAND

As of Monday, Wasilat’s message is straightforward. She is alive, she says the viral death claims were false, and she disputes that what she filmed was the true Oloolu at all.

The palace’s spokesperson, for his part, has confirmed her survival while standing by the account that a taboo was broken, whether knowingly or not, and that the traditional response that followed was carried out in line with custom.

Between those two accounts sits a young woman who says she simply wants the matter closed. “I don’t know who came up with that agenda, but I know God will judge,” she said, closing out her first public comment on the controversy that briefly made her one of the most talked about names in Oyo State.