Abẹ́òkúta and the Ẹ̀gbá

Abẹ́òkúta is a city of refugees that kept the identities of the people who fled into it. Founded around 1830 under a granite outcrop called Olúmọ by Ẹ̀gbá driven from their towns by the wars that followed the collapse of Ọ̀yọ́, it did not merge them into one polity. It kept four separate Ẹ̀gbá sections, each with its own ọba, inside one city, and it still does. Four crowned rulers sit in Abẹ́òkúta today, which makes it structurally unlike any other Yoruba town.

The name is Abẹ́ Òkúta, under the rock or under the stone, and the rock is Olúmọ 12.

Lisabi and the origin of Ẹ̀gbá independence

Before Abẹ́òkúta there was Ẹ̀gbá Forest, Ẹ̀gbá Àgbáyé in some renderings, a group of towns in the forest under Ọ̀yọ́ overlordship 3. The Ẹ̀gbá account of how they left that overlordship centres on Lisabi, and it is the founding political story of the group.

The tradition is that Lisabi, from Ìtokò in Gbágùrà, organised the Ẹ̀gbá farmers into a mutual-aid society, the Arò, ostensibly for cooperative farm labour, and used it to coordinate a simultaneous rising in which the Ọ̀yọ́ resident officials, the ìlàrí posted to collect tribute, were killed on the same day across the Ẹ̀gbá towns 3. The revolt is placed in the later eighteenth century, during the reign of Aláàfin Abíọ́dún or shortly after. Lisabi is remembered as the father of the Ẹ̀gbá, and Lisabi Day is a public holiday in Ògùn State.

Treat the details as tradition. That the Ẹ̀gbá broke from Ọ̀yọ́ in the late eighteenth century is consistent with the general weakening of Ọ̀yọ́ authority in that period and is accepted; the specific mechanism, the Arò society and the coordinated killing, comes from Ẹ̀gbá oral tradition preserved and given wide circulation by Samuel Johnson and later Ẹ̀gbá writers, and it has the shape of a foundation charter. It is what the Ẹ̀gbá say about themselves, which is worth knowing precisely as that.

Ẹ̀gbá independence did not survive long. The nineteenth-century wars destroyed the Ẹ̀gbá forest towns, and the survivors moved.

The founding

Ẹ̀gbá groups displaced by the wars enlisted Ṣódẹkẹ́, of Ìpòrò, as their leader and migrated to the hilly ground at Olúmọ rock, where they established Abẹ́òkúta around 1830 12. Ṣódẹkẹ́ is the founding figure and the town's principal early leader; he held the title of Ṣágbùà rather than a crown, and he died in 1845.

The site was chosen for defence. Olúmọ is a granite inselberg with caves and clefts in which people could shelter and from which the approaches could be watched and held, and the tradition is explicit that Ẹ̀gbá fugitives were hidden in it before the town was formally established 12. The threat it was chosen against was raiding for captives, from Dahomey to the west and from Ìbàdàn and the Ìjẹ̀bú in the interior 1.

The four townships and their rulers

This is the part that makes Abẹ́òkúta institutionally distinctive. The town was not assembled into a single kingdom. Each arriving Ẹ̀gbá section kept its own territory within the new town, its own chiefs and its own ruler, and the arrangement persists 4.

Section	Ruler's title	Seat
Ẹ̀gbá Aké	Aláké of Ẹ̀gbáland	Aké
Ẹ̀gbá Òkè-Ọ̀nà	Òṣìlé of Òkè-Ọ̀nà Ẹ̀gbá	Oko
Ẹ̀gbá Gbágùrà	Àgùrà of Gbágùrà	Ìdó
Ọ̀wu	Olówu of Ọ̀wu	Ọ̀wu

The Aláké, based at Aké, is the paramount ruler of the Ẹ̀gbá 4. The paramountcy is real in current practice but it is worth being precise about its history: the Aláké was the senior figure among the four, and British administration converted that seniority into a formal paramountcy over all Ẹ̀gbá territory because indirect rule required a single ruler to deal with 3. The other three are crowned ọba in their own right, not subordinate chiefs, and the relationship among the four is one of precedence rather than subordination. Disputes about the exact extent of Aláké paramountcy recur.

Ọ̀wu is a distinct case and should not be treated simply as an Ẹ̀gbá section. Ọ̀wu was a separate and old Yoruba kingdom, destroyed in the Ọ̀wu war of the 1820s by an allied force of Ifẹ̀, Ìjẹ̀bú and Ọ̀yọ́ elements, and its surviving people took refuge with the Ẹ̀gbá at Abẹ́òkúta. The Olówu therefore rules a people incorporated into Abẹ́òkúta rather than an original Ẹ̀gbá division, and Ọ̀wu identity remains separate. Ọ̀wu towns exist elsewhere as well, including Ọ̀wu-Ìpólé near Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and Ọ̀wu in Ọ̀ṣun State, and the question of which Ọ̀wu is senior is contested among them.

Some accounts count five sections rather than four by treating Ìbàràpá or another grouping separately; four plus Ọ̀wu is the usual formulation 4.

The internal structure below the ọba ran through the Ògbóni, the earth-cult society that in Ẹ̀gbáland held judicial and legislative weight, the Ológun or war chiefs, and the Parákòyí, the chiefs of trade. Real power in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta lay with the Ògbóni and the Ológun rather than with any single ruler, and the Aláké's authority was constrained accordingly.

The wars with Dahomey

Dahomey's raids on the Ẹ̀gbá are the defining external threat of the town's first fifty years. Abẹ́òkúta defeated the forces of King Gezo in 1851 and repelled a second major attack in 1864 1. The 1851 victory came with British assistance, and this is where Abẹ́òkúta's relationship with Britain begins.

The connection ran through the returnee population. Sàró, Yoruba liberated from slave ships and settled at Freetown in Sierra Leone, began returning to Abẹ́òkúta from the late 1830s, bringing literacy, English, Christianity and commercial contacts. The Church Missionary Society established itself in the town in 1846, with Henry Townsend a principal figure 3, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, himself an Ẹ̀gbá recaptive, worked there. Abẹ́òkúta consequently became the most missionised and most literate Yoruba town of the mid-century, and British opinion treated it for a period as a favoured client and a model of what a Christian African state might be.

That produced concrete firsts. Ìwé Ìròyìn, founded at Abẹ́òkúta in 1859 by Townsend, was the first newspaper published in a Nigerian language 3, and the Ẹ̀gbá were the first Nigerian polity to adopt a national anthem 3.

The Ẹ̀gbá United Board of Management and the Ẹ̀gbá United Government

Abẹ́òkúta's returnee population produced the earliest attempt at a modern administrative state in the region. The Ẹ̀gbá United Board of Management was established in 1865, largely by Sàró and Brazilian returnees, with written records, a treasury, postal arrangements and a customs function 1. It did not survive long in that form, but the idea did.

In 1893 the Ẹ̀gbá United Government was formalised at Abẹ́òkúta and, critically, was recognised by the United Kingdom 15. This is the fact worth holding onto: Britain recognised the Ẹ̀gbá United Government as a sovereign state by treaty, and Abẹ́òkúta was therefore not part of the British protectorate while every polity around it was being annexed. The EUG had a secretary, departments, a police force, courts and a printed gazette, and it was staffed largely by Western-educated Ẹ̀gbá.

It lasted twenty-one years. In 1914, the year of the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria, Britain abrogated the instrument and incorporated Ẹ̀gbá territory into the colony, with Abẹ́òkúta as the provincial capital 15.

The Ẹ̀gbá case is therefore the sharpest available test of what British recognition of African sovereignty was worth. The answer is that it lasted exactly as long as it was administratively convenient.

The Adubi war, 1918

Ògùn Adubi, also called the Ẹ̀gbá uprising, ran through June and July 1918, four years after the abrogation. Its immediate cause was the imposition of colonial direct taxation, together with forced labour on the railway and the loss of the Ẹ̀gbá courts 6. Around thirty thousand people took part. Fighting continued for roughly three weeks at Otite, Tappona, Mokoloki and Lalako, and by 10 July it had been suppressed, with the leaders killed or arrested 6.

It was the only serious internal challenge to British control anywhere in Nigeria during the First World War 6. It is under-treated in general accounts of Nigerian resistance and it belongs alongside the 1929 Aba women's war as one of the two large anti-tax risings of the colonial period.

The Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union

The second Abẹ́òkúta tax revolt succeeded, and it was run by women.

The Abẹ́òkúta Ladies' Club, founded by Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti, was renamed the Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union in 1946 and opened to market women, growing into a mass organisation with a membership in the tens of thousands 7. Its grievance was the flat tax levied on women, collected by the Sole Native Authority under the Aláké, together with the arbitrary conduct of the tax collectors and the exclusion of women from any representation.

In November 1947 a crowd estimated at ten thousand women, led by Ransome-Kuti, marched on the Aláké's palace, singing and dancing in protest and demanding an end to taxation without representation 7. Further marches through April 1948 produced the suspension of direct taxation on women and a tentative increase in women's representation 7. The campaign continued, and on 3 January 1949 the Aláké, Ládapọ̀ Adémọlá II, abdicated 7. The tax on women was abolished and four women, Ransome-Kuti among them, were named to a new interim council 7.

Adémọlá II returned to the throne in 1950 and reigned until 1962, so the abdication was not permanent. What the campaign permanently altered was the assumption that a Sole Native Authority backed by colonial power could tax without answering to the taxed. The AWU's method, mass mobilisation of market women through existing market organisation, is the direct institutional ancestor of women's political organisation in southwestern Nigeria.

The songs the AWU used in the marches are documented in the campaign literature and are in Yoruba, deploying the register of insult and public shaming that Yoruba women's collective action traditionally uses against a man who has failed in office. A full three-layer treatment of those texts belongs in the oral-literature section, where the genre can be handled properly.

Sites

Olúmọ rock is both the defensive origin of the town and its principal heritage site, with the shrine of Olúmọ, the caves used by the original refugees, and the resident priestesses. It is now developed for visitors with a lift to the upper level, and it remains an active ritual site as well as a tourist one.

The Aláké's palace at Aké is the ceremonial centre. Wọlé Ṣóyínká's Aké: The Years of Childhood is set in the parsonage adjoining it and is the best available account of what the town felt like in the 1930s and 1940s, including a first-hand child's view of the women's movement.

Centenary Hall, the Ẹ̀gbá United Government buildings, and the early CMS churches survive in varying condition. The Adire market at Itoku is the centre of the Abẹ́òkúta indigo-resist cloth trade, and Abẹ́òkúta is the principal historic centre of àdìrẹ production, treated in the textiles section.

Current status

Abẹ́òkúta became the capital of Ògùn State on the state's creation in 1976, with an estimated population around 735,000 in 2022 1. It sits about eighty kilometres north of Lagos on the Ògùn river and functions substantially as an outer node of the Lagos economy while retaining a distinct civic identity.

Its output of national figures is disproportionate: Ọlúṣẹ́gun Ọbásanjọ́ and Bọ́lá Tinubu, Wọlé Ṣóyínká, Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti and Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti, M. K. O. Abíọ́lá, Ernest Shonekan 3. The usual explanation is the mid-nineteenth-century missionary schools, which gave Abẹ́òkúta a two-generation head start in Western education over most of the region, and it is a reasonable explanation.