Lagos: Kòsọ́kọ́, Akítóyè and Dòsùnmú

The British acquisition of Lagos was not a conquest of a foreign state by an outside power acting alone. It was a succession quarrel inside the royal family descended from Ọba Ológun Kutere, in which one faction sought British help against the other, and the British used that opening to take the town. The stated justification was the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, and Lagos was in fact one of the largest slave-exporting ports on the West African coast, its ruler at the time a slave trader. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other. Kristin Mann's study is the authoritative account and this file follows it 1.

The feud

The quarrel begins in personal offence and never really leaves it.

Kòsọ́kọ́, son of Ọba Òsínlókun who reigned 1821 to 1829, offended Eletu Odibo, the prime minister and chief kingmaker of Lagos, by marrying a woman betrothed to Eletu 2. Eletu extended the vendetta to Kòsọ́kọ́'s sister Opo Olu, accusing her of witchcraft; though diviners cleared her, Ọba Olúwọlé banished her. The failed rising that followed, Ogun Ewe Koko, the coco-yam leaves war, sent Kòsọ́kọ́ into exile at Epe. Eletu then dug up Kòsọ́kọ́'s mother's remains and threw the corpse into the Lagos lagoon 2.

That desecration governs everything after it. In Yoruba terms it is not an insult; it is an attack on the dead and on the lineage itself, and it made reconciliation impossible.

On Ọba Adélé's death in 1837 Eletu blocked Kòsọ́kọ́'s accession and installed Olúwọlé, Adélé's son. Olúwọlé was killed in 1841 when lightning struck the palace and set off stored gunpowder 2. With Kòsọ́kọ́'s whereabouts unknown and the feud unresolved, Akítóyè, Kòsọ́kọ́'s uncle and a son of Ọba Ológun Kutere, was installed.

Akítóyè's first reign and Kòsọ́kọ́'s seizure

Akítóyè attempted reconciliation and recalled his nephew, which his chiefs warned him against. Kòsọ́kọ́ returned aboard the ship of the slave trader José Domingo Martínez and was granted the title Ọlọ́ja of Ereko 2. He built support among the war chiefs and the Muslim community, and when Akítóyè recalled Eletu Odibo from Badagry the crisis broke.

Ogun Olomiro, the Salt Water War, in July 1845, was a three-week siege of the palace. Akítóyè conceded and escaped up the lagoon, given safe passage through Agboyi Creek by Oshodi Tapa, Kòsọ́kọ́'s war captain, an act of restraint in a war that had none elsewhere. Eletu Odibo was captured; Kòsọ́kọ́ sealed him in an empty oil barrel, set it alight and dumped it in the lagoon 2.

Kòsọ́kọ́ reigned from 1845 to 1851. His regime's commercial base was the Atlantic slave trade through Brazilian and Portuguese factors, Martínez among them, and he was himself a slave trader and slave owner 1 2. This was the British pretext for intervention and it was substantially accurate, whatever the mixture of motives on the British side.

Akítóyè's appeal

Akítóyè went to Abẹ́òkúta and then in December 1845 to Badagry, where he allied with CMS missionaries and with Consul John Beecroft. His formal appeal of December 1850 is the founding document of British Lagos, asking Britain to take Lagos under protection and re-establish him on his throne, and promising in return to enter a treaty to abolish the slave trade 2.

He offered the British exactly what they wanted, in exchange for exactly what he wanted. Neither party was deceived about the transaction.

The bombardment, December 1851

In November 1851 a British party proposed friendly relations conditional on abandoning the Atlantic slave trade. Kòsọ́kọ́ rejected it on the technical ground that Lagos was subject to the Ọba of Benin, and that only Benin could treat with foreign powers about its status 2. That is a legally shrewd answer and it is the one moment when the historic Lagos-Benin relationship becomes decisive in the record.

On 4 December 1851 Consul Beecroft declared that Kòsọ́kọ́, by firing on a flag of truce, had declared war on England, and threatened destruction by fire. From 26 to 28 December 1851 a British naval force including HMS Bloodhound and HMS Teazer, with a flotilla of boats, attacked the palace. The event is known in Lagos as Ogun Ahoyaya or Ogun Agidingbi, the war of the boiling or booming cannon 2. Kòsọ́kọ́ resisted for three days and on 28 December fled with his chiefs, first toward Ìjẹ̀bú and then settling at Epe by 1852 with about four hundred warriors including Oshodi Tapa 2.

The British call it the Reduction of Lagos. The Yoruba name records what it sounded like.

The 1852 treaty and Akítóyè's death

On 1 January 1852 the restored Akítóyè signed the Treaty Between Great Britain and Lagos, banning all slave-trading activity at Lagos 3.

Kòsọ́kọ́ counter-attacked twice from Epe in 1853, on 5 and 11 August, the second reaching close to the palace before British naval fire repulsed it 2.

Akítóyè died on 2 September 1853. The cause is disputed: Dòsùnmú believed he was poisoned by Kòsọ́kọ́'s supporters, and Jean Herskovits Kopytoff has suggested the possibility of ritual suicide, on the reading that Akítóyè had come to see that his British alliance had destroyed his own authority 2 4. Both readings are named here. The first Eyo procession is said to have been held to commemorate his death, which is why Eyo, now the signature Lagos masquerade, is bound up with this specific succession.

On 28 September 1854 Kòsọ́kọ́ signed the Treaty of Epe with Consul Benjamin Campbell, renouncing his claims to Lagos and undertaking not to endanger its commerce 2. Read carefully, that is a tactical success for Kòsọ́kọ́: it obtained British recognition of his own state at Epe.

Dòsùnmú and the cession of 1861

Dòsùnmú, rendered Docemo in British documents, was born about 1823 at Lagos and died in 1885.

His accession followed a procedural manoeuvre. On Akítóyè's death Consul Campbell asked the paramount chiefs to name the rightful heir before disclosing that Akítóyè was dead, which produced a unanimous nomination of Dòsùnmú, who then received a twenty-one gun salute from the Royal Navy 2. A British consul thereby managed the succession of a supposedly independent kingdom.

The cession followed in 1861. Acting Governor William McCoskry convened the meeting aboard HMS Prometheus on 30 July 1861. Dòsùnmú resisted the terms. Commander Bedingfield threatened to unleash violence on Lagos, and Dòsùnmú signed 2. The Treaty of Cession is dated August 1861 and conventionally 6 August, though this corpus has not independently confirmed the day. Its terms ceded Lagos to Britain, relinquished trading rights, and gave Dòsùnmú an annual pension of one thousand pounds 2.

Dòsùnmú afterwards protested Governor John Hawley Glover's favouritism toward Kòsọ́kọ́'s commercial faction. After an attempted revolt encouraged by French firms, Glover fined him fifty pounds and suspended his stipend for four months 2. That detail says more about what the cession actually meant than the treaty text does. He was succeeded on his death by his son Ọba Oyekan I.

Kòsọ́kọ́'s return

Kòsọ́kọ́ petitioned in 1860 through the Ọba of Benin and was refused. After the 1861 annexation the British permitted his return to Lagos with the title Ọlọ́ja of Ereko and a pension of four hundred pounds a year 2. He died in 1872, with 1873 appearing as a variant, and was buried at Iga Ereko. At his death the colonial government judged his economic faction, which included Oshodi Tapa and Taiwo Olowo, the stronger of the two in Lagos, with at least twenty thousand followers 2.

The British had bombarded the town to remove him and then, ten years later, brought him back on a pension because his faction was commercially useful. That sequence is the clearest available statement of what the anti-slavery justification was and was not.

What to take from it

The suppression of the slave trade at Lagos was real. Lagos was a major slaving port, the trade there was destroyed, and enormous numbers of people were not shipped who otherwise would have been. Kòsọ́kọ́ was a slave trader and Akítóyè and Tinúbú were participants in the same economy on the other side of the family quarrel.

The acquisition of Lagos as a colony was also real, was the beginning of the conquest of what became Nigeria, and was obtained by naval bombardment, by managing a succession, and by a treaty signed under an explicit threat to destroy the town. Both statements describe the same events. A reader who has been given only one of them has been given half.