According to accounts, sacred religious sites were visited by admirers or people who shared the same faith and fellowship while exploring the holy sites.
In traditional society, religion permeated every part of the culture such that it was difficult to dissociate one from the other. Nigeria possesses numerous worship sites that attract admirers and adherents. The oracle, according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, is the medium by which deities were consulted like in ancient Greek and Roman kingdoms. However, this explanation is silent about some other elements that can be essential for oracle. For this reason this writer presents an oracle as a deity with a shrine and also a priest or priestess who ministers to it and plays the intermediary between it and human beings who come to consult it.
Some popular oracles included the Okija Shrine, Ala Ogbaga and Amadioha Ozuzu. Others are the Oshun Oshogbo Sacred Groove and the Omo-Ukwu temple . Ibeanu therefore saw as his aim in the study, to project the role of the caves in Okigwi in cultural tourism shown in the people’s oral tradition and how they can be made to play a role today as a way of developing tourism in Okigwi area and its surroundings . The caves he was referring to are Okpuchukwu in Otamkpa, Uhuchukwu in Ahaba Imenyi and Isi-Ume cave in Uturu, all in Okigwi surroundings.
A lot of domestic tourisms flourish in the above named few places of faith and often people who visit those places are people who are in search of justice. Okpoko rightly points out that in ATR, God is conceived as a judge, as the God of justice. From the earliest time, as King observed, “people believed that they were governed by the gods, represented by their priests.”
The rights group, in a statement, wants the Federal Government to set up such a pilgrim’s commission for ATR, similar to the Institutions that care for the pilgrimages of Christians and Muslims at public expenses or else it will challenge the discrimination by the government of millions of practitioners of the respected African traditional religion in court.
“The two agencies are responsible for the religious interests of the Muslims and Christians, including the facilitation of annual pilgrimages by adherents of the two religions to Mecca and Jerusalem respectively”, HURIWA had lamented.