Ìbàdàn and Its War Chiefs: Ọlúyọlé, Ìbíkúnlé, Ògúnmọ́lá, Látòóṣà

Ìbàdàn began as a war camp around 1829 and within thirty years was the strongest military power in Yorubaland. Its constitution had no crowned king. Titles were achieved rather than inherited, and they were open to any freeborn male resident, with demonstrated military ability as the criterion. A man could arrive as a refugee, a farmer or an Ifá priest and end as commander of the largest army in the country, and several did. This is the sharpest institutional break in nineteenth-century Yoruba history and the reason Ìbàdàn is conventionally described as a republic, though that word needs qualification.

What the system produced abroad was an empire governed through resident agents and financed by captives. Bọ́lańlé Awẹ́'s analysis is the standard statement of the economics: military demand stimulated trade, agriculture and craft production, while continuous warfare prevented sustained development, and the labour system underneath was slavery 1.

The constitution

Ọ̀yọ́ was a sacred monarchy. The Aláàfin was a crowned king of a royal lineage, ritually set apart, checked by the Ọ̀yọ́ Mèsì under the Bàṣọ̀run whose ultimate sanction was the covered calabash. Succession was dynastic. Ìbàdàn was none of that. Its head held the title Baálẹ̀, a town headman's title rather than a kingly one, and the real power lay with the war chiefs.

The government ran in four lines. The civil line was headed by the Baálẹ̀, later Olúbadàn, with Ọ̀tún Baálẹ̀, Òsì Baálẹ̀, Àṣípa, Ẹ̀kẹrin and Ẹ̀kàrún descending. The senior military line was headed by the Balógun with the same ladder beneath him. The junior military line was headed by the Ṣeríkí, the chief scout, commanding the younger warriors. The fourth line was female, headed by the Ìyálóde, who sat in council and was a kingmaker but whose line could not produce the town's head 2.

Ọ̀tún is the right hand, Òsì the left, and Àṣípa, Ẹ̀kẹrin and Ẹ̀kàrún are fourth and fifth in order: the ladder is a battle order converted into a promotion sequence. Promotion ran by seniority up the rungs, with supersession strongly disapproved of, so a chief advanced as those above him died. Office was therefore a function of survival as much as of merit, which produced very old civil heads and very active war chiefs 2.

The dual line has a specific origin. Ìbàdàn was founded in continuous war, so the war chiefs under the Balógun were the town's leaders; because they were absent on campaign and uninterested in civil administration, they created the Baálẹ̀ line to govern in their absence 2. The system is dated firm from 1851, when Ọ̀yẹ́ṣílẹ̀ Olúgbóde became Baálẹ̀ and Ìbíkúnlé Balógun 2.

The clearest evidence that no title was constitutionally fixed to the office is that successive heads chose different ones. Ògúnmọ́lá took Bàṣọ̀run, the old Ọ̀yọ́ prime-ministerial title. Látòóṣà took Àrẹ̀ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò, the Ọ̀yọ́ generalissimo's title, on the ground that Baálẹ̀ and Bàṣọ̀run were of lower rank than brave soldiers should take [S3]. That freedom is unthinkable in a monarchy.

Ruth Watson's study is the necessary corrective to the tidy republican framing. Her title, Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan, is a quotation from the sources, and her argument is that the competitive title system was seen by contemporaries as pathological as well as productive, and that the making of Ìbàdàn as a civic community shifted over time from the battlefield to a discursive field 4.

A caution on sources: the frequently cited detailed ladders and kingmaker lists derive from the 1959 Olubadan Chieftaincy Declaration, a colonial-era codification, and should not be projected back onto the nineteenth century, when the ladder was shorter and less formalised 2.

Bàṣọ̀run Ọlúyọlé (head of Ìbàdàn, 1830s to 1847)

A son of an Ọ̀yọ́ royal house, recognised as Bàṣọ̀run by Aláàfin Àtìbà in the settlement that divided the old imperial military authority between Ìbàdàn and Ìjàyè [S5]. Under him Ìbàdàn consolidated as the shield against Ìlọrin and began the expansion that made it an empire.

Balógun Ìbíkúnlé (died 1864)

Balógun of Ìbàdàn from 1851 to 1864, commander-in-chief through the town's expansionist peak. He fought at Ara, against the Ẹ̀gbá, and commanded in the Ìjàyè war, which he opened on 10 April 1860 and prosecuted by blockade rather than assault, cutting Ìjàyè's food supply from the Òkè-Ògùn flank rather than storming the walls [S5] [S6].

Missionary sources, principally Anna and David Hinderer of the CMS who lived at Ìbàdàn, present him as the more restrained of the two senior Ìbàdàn commanders [S7]. That judgement should be read for what it is: an assessment by European neighbours and dependants of the man on whose protection they relied, which is not a neutral vantage.

He died in 1864 after the return from the Kutuje campaign. The precise sequence of Balógun and Baálẹ̀ dating around that year is not clean in the available sources and should be treated as approximate [S5].

Bàṣọ̀run Ògúnmọ́lá (died 1867)

Ògúnmọ́lá is the strongest single illustration of what the Ìbàdàn system made possible. He was born at Ifesusu, in the Alawe compound near Ìwó in present Osun State, and was trained as an Ifá priest. He came to Ìbàdàn on priestly business in the mid-nineteenth century [S5]. His entire later career was military.

He attached himself to the war chiefs, rose to Ọ̀tún Balógun under Ìbíkúnlé, and became Bàṣọ̀run, holding the town's headship from 1865 to 1867 after Ìbíkúnlé's death [S5]. His choice of the Bàṣọ̀run title rather than Baálẹ̀ was a claim: Bàṣọ̀run was Ọ̀yọ́'s prime-ministerial office, and assuming it at Ìbàdàn asserted Ìbàdàn's succession to Ọ̀yọ́ authority.

He was the driving commander of the Ìjàyè campaign, more aggressive than Ìbíkúnlé. Oral tradition holds that he pressed the war partly to avenge Kúrunmí's treatment of him during an earlier period as Kúrunmí's captive, and credits him with twenty-one victories in twenty-three wars including Kutuje, Arakonga and campaigns against the Ìjẹ̀bú, Ẹ̀gbá and Ekiti [S5]. Both the motive and the tally are tradition rather than documented record and are marked as such here. Any source placing him at Kiriji is simply wrong: that war began in 1877, ten years after his death.

He died in 1867. Tradition attributes the death to conspiracy involving his bed, which is medically incoherent as usually stated and is reported here as tradition, not as cause of death [S5].

His private army trained Ògèdèńgbé of Ìlẹ̀ṣà in the 1850s, which is a direct link between Ìbàdàn's military system and the man who later commanded the confederacy that broke Ìbàdàn's empire [S8].

Àrẹ̀ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò Látòóṣà (c. 1820s to 31 August 1885)

Ọbadọ́kè Látòóṣà Ọyátòóṣà, byname Ìyàndá Asúbíaró, and after his conversion to Islam Mohammed or Momodu Obadoke Latoosa; the spelling Latosisa is used interchangeably in the literature. His father was Ore-òrìṣà Ọyátòóṣà and his mother Ọyátòókí. He was born about the 1820s at Ìlọ́ra in Ọ̀yọ́ territory and began as a palm-tree farmer [S3].

At Ìbàdàn he joined Ògúnmọ́lá's private army, rose to captain of Ògúnmọ́lá's guards, commanded in the Ìjàyè war, and was installed as head of Ìbàdàn on 3 October 1871, holding the office until his death [S3]. He took the title Àrẹ̀ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò, counted the twelfth holder and the last to hold it as a functioning military command [S9].

That choice was constitutionally consequential. By taking a purely military title as head of the town he collapsed the civil and military headships into one office and broke the dual-line convention that had governed Ìbàdàn since 1851 [S3]. The Kakanfò was also, by Ọ̀yọ́ convention, an office that could not reside in the capital, so its assumption by the ruler of Ìbàdàn was an assertion about Ìbàdàn's relation to Ọ̀yọ́ as much as about its internal order.

His empire was governed through the ajẹlẹ̀ system: resident agents in tributary towns collecting tribute and exercising wide personal authority. The consistent testimony of the eastern Yoruba kingdoms, and the assessment in the scholarship, is that they were autocratic and abusive, and that the eastern towns endured this for roughly three decades [S9]. This is the structural cause of the Kiriji war, treated in its own file. Ìbàdàn's republicanism at home was compatible with, and financed by, despotism abroad, and that is not a paradox to be explained away but the actual shape of the system.

His death, on 31 August 1885 by the usual dating with 1886 appearing as a variant, is recorded in tradition as follows. He favoured a slave whom he allowed the liberties of a freeborn man. The slave insulted Balógun Ọ̀ṣúngbẹkun, who had him whipped. Látòóṣà summoned the Balógun to justify himself. Ọ̀ṣúngbẹkun, enraged that a general should be made to answer in a slave's cause, drew his sword and beheaded the slave on the spot, and the other generals sided with him. Látòóṣà, seeing that he had lost his chiefs, withdrew and took poison [S3] [S9].

That account is tradition and is marked as such. It is also internally coherent as a constitutional story, which is why it has held: it demonstrates the limit of the Kakanfò's authority against the collective of war chiefs, which is precisely the limit Látòóṣà had spent his career trying to abolish.

Slavery, stated plainly

The Ìbàdàn war economy was a slave economy. Captives were the principal product of its campaigns and the labour force of its chiefs' households and farms. Samuel Johnson records elite slaves at Ìbàdàn 10. Ẹfúnṣetán Aníwúrà's holdings, treated in her own file, and the slave at the centre of Látòóṣà's death both belong to this structure rather than being exceptions to it. Awẹ́'s argument that military expansion connected directly to the labour systems supporting economic activity is the analytical statement of it 1.

Ìbàdàn's captives entered domestic slavery in Yorubaland and, until the Atlantic trade was suppressed at Lagos in the 1850s, the export trade as well. Peace came to the region with British rule at the end of the century, which is a fact about the timing and not an endorsement of the means.