People · c. 1750-1774 · Tradition
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For about twenty years the most feared man in Old Oyo was not the Alaafin but the chief who led his council. Four kings fell under him. The fifth waited, turned the town against him, and gave the Yoruba a proverb that is still used.
There is a Yoruba saying that grown people still use when someone is getting too proud of his own cruelty. Bo laya ko sika, to ba ri iku Gaa, ko sootọ. Roughly: be as wicked as you dare, but once you have seen how Gaa died, you will learn to be straight. Almost every Yoruba person has heard the name. Fewer know the full story behind it.
Basorun Gaa lived in Oyo-Ile, the old capital of the Oyo empire, in the eighteenth century. In 2025 BBC Yoruba retold his life, drawing on the many accounts that circulate about him, and it began with a fair warning. Gaa was not only a villain. Nobody reaches a high place, the BBC said, without real ability, and in the beginning he did a great deal for his town.
To understand his power, you need to know how Oyo was ruled. At the top was the Alaafin, the king. Beside him sat the Oyo Mesi, a council of seven high chiefs who acted as the kingmakers. The head of that council carried the title Basorun. The BBC compares the post to a prime minister. After the Alaafin, the Basorun was the most important man in the kingdom.
Gaa also led Oyo's armies, and in his time the empire was strong. The BBC says he worked very hard to make Oyo-Ile a great city whose reach stretched over many towns, and into lands that are separate countries today. Oyo was rich in those years, and tribute came in from the many towns under its rule.
It was Alaafin Labisi who made Gaa the Basorun, in about 1750. It was a choice the king would not live long to regret. The BBC says power went to Gaa's head the way strong drink does.
Almost at once, Gaa killed two of the Alaafin's closest and most trusted friends. Labisi was hurt to the bone. That same year, by this account, the king took his own life.
Gaa was now the real master of the town. Young and old feared him and bowed to him. His orders carried more weight in Oyo than the orders of the king who had appointed him. People believed he had very strong medicine. Tradition says he could change himself into any animal he wished, a leopard or a lion or one of the smaller creatures of the bush.
The next Alaafin was Awonbioju. He would not take orders from the Basorun. He lasted only a hundred and thirty days on the throne before Gaa had him put out of the way.
After him came Agboluaje. He did better for a while, because he listened to Gaa and did as he was told. But in the end his life too fell into Gaa's hands.
Then came Majeogbe, who reigned for only a single year before Gaa, in the BBC's words, sent him to heaven in broad daylight.
Four Alaafins had now died while Gaa held the real power. The next man on the throne was Abiodun, and he had clearly studied what had happened to the others. He did not fight Gaa openly. He looked quietly for a way to bring him down.
Gaa gave him no peace. The most cruel story told about him belongs to this time. Abiodun had a daughter named Agborin. One day Gaa needed an agbonrin, an antelope, for some purpose of his own. Because the girl's name sounded so much like the animal's, he killed her instead. The grief and anger that followed decided Abiodun. He went for help to the Onikoyi, and to the Aare Ona Kakanfo of the time, the great war general Oyabi of Ajase Ipo, so that together they could finish Gaa.
Abiodun's real weapon was the people of Oyo. Slowly he took away the fear they felt for the Basorun and let their anger rise to the surface. As the town turned against him, Gaa grew weaker, as if his arms and legs were losing their strength.
In 1774 the end came. Crowds of people from Oyo-Ile poured into Gaa's compound and dragged him out to Akesan market. There he was burned in a great fire. They killed his children with him, and his compound was destroyed completely.
Only one of his family got away. His eldest son, Ojo Aburumaku, escaped and fled to the land of the Bariba. With that, the long years in which Gaa's family had lorded it over everyone else came to an end. And that is the death the proverb points to. However bold you are in wickedness, look at how Gaa finished.
The BBC adds a sad turn to the story. Gaa's fall did not make Oyo stronger. After his death the army's power began to slip, and the strength of the town with it. Some of the towns under Oyo began to break away, and the decline went on until Old Oyo itself broke up in 1836. Whatever evil he did, the man who had held the empire together by fear had also been holding it together.
The BBC closes with lessons, as Yoruba storytellers like to do. Those who hold power should handle it gently. Good and evil both come back to the doer, sometimes in this life. And parents should remember another old saying: the elder who cooks a pot of wickedness will see his children eat from it. Gaa's own children did.
