What makes the Ohafia dance more than a martial display is that it is a way of asserting history. The songs and the called names identify which ancestors did what, which village was the aggressor and which the defender in a given conflict, and which lineage holds the credit. Neighbouring Ohafia villages perform accounts of the same events that do not agree, and the disagreement is carried in the dance rather than settled outside it. A performance is therefore a claim, and it is understood as one by the people watching it.
That gives the dance an unusual position in the atlas. It is not a liturgy and it is not addressed to a deity. Its religious relevance lies in the ancestral honour it belongs to, in its place within funerary rite, and in the fact that Igbo traditional religion, Odinani, treats the standing of the dead within the community as a live matter that the living are responsible for maintaining. On that reading the dance is one of the instruments by which the responsibility is discharged.
The dance is also performed today at cultural festivals, at state occasions and for visitors, and Ohafia people perform it in diaspora associations. Both settings are real, and the atlas records the funerary and ancestral use as the older and the more consequential without treating the newer one as false.