Place name · 15th century to 2020 · Mixed
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The Oba of Lagos lives in a palace whose name means "the palace built on a pepper farm". Under its roof are Portuguese tiles, the graves of kings, a shrine at the gate, and a night in 2020 when it was looted.
Lagos Island today is concrete, traffic and market noise. It is hard to picture it as anyone's farm. But the story the island tells about itself starts with exactly that.
Going back to the fifteenth century, Lagos tradition says the island was first owned by Chief Aromire, a nobleman from Ile-Ife. He used it as a fishing spot and as a pepper farm. That pepper farm is the reason the Oba of Lagos's palace has the name it has.
The palace is called Iga Idunganran. Break the name down and the farm is right there in it. Iga comes from the Yoruba word for a royal home or palace. Idun means land, or a place. Iganran is the Yoruba word for pepper. Put together, Iga Idunganran is "the palace built on a pepper farm", because the land under it is said to have been Aromire's farm before any king lived there.
The first palace on the spot was built in 1670 for Oba Gabaro, who reigned from 1669 until 1760. That is a reign of more than ninety years if the dates are right, which tells you something about how these early records were kept and passed down. Later the building was refurbished by the Portuguese, who brought materials over from Portugal, especially tiles. So a royal house on an Awori pepper plot ended up decorated with tiles shipped all the way from Europe.
Then came the modern palace. Its newer part was finished and opened on 1 October 1960, and it was commissioned by the Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Later Obas, Adeniji Adele II and Adeyinka Oyekan II, modernised it again, and in 2007 and 2008 the present Oba, Rilwan Akiolu, worked on it with the Lagos State government and the national museum.
A palace is a home, but this one is also a graveyard, and its graves tell a story about where Lagos's kings felt they belonged.
All the Obas of Lagos who reigned before Oba Akitoye were buried in Benin City, not in Lagos. That says a lot about the old link between the Lagos throne and Benin. Akitoye broke the pattern. He was the first Oba of Lagos to be buried inside the palace itself. Every Oba after him has been buried at Iga Idunganran too, with two exceptions: Sanusi Olusi and Kosoko.
The palace has always been more than a place to sleep and bury kings. Over the years it has worked as an administration centre, as the island's market and as the venue for the Eyo festival, one of the island's best-known celebrations. Much of what made Lagos Island Lagos happened in and around these walls.
There are shrines inside the grounds too. At the exit gate stands a shrine to Esu. In the past the Oba and his chiefs prayed there to keep danger away from Lagos, and later from Nigeria as a whole. Before the Oba left the palace for anything, private or official, he was meant to stop at that shrine and ask how the journey would go: would it go well, and was it safe to go at all.
Ogun, the god of iron, has a place as well. His main shrine is actually outside the present palace walls, though it still falls under the palace, and it has a priestess who looks after it day to day. A small structure inside the grounds gives quick access to it.
Old rites still go on in the palace. Every sixteen days, special prayers and rites are held, usually led by the Araba of Lagos, Chief Ajanaku. The Oba sometimes calls on other priests and priestesses, depending on the occasion and on how strong he believes their spiritual power to be.
The things used in these rituals are a list you could almost buy at a Lagos market: bitter kola, kola nuts, alligator pepper, palm oil, schnapps or plain gin, chickens, pigeons, and goats or rams, along with anything else the Ifa oracle asks for, short of a human life. Pepper, fittingly, is still on the list in the palace named after a pepper farm.
The palace's most recent headline was a violent one. In October 2020, in the chaos that followed the End SARS protests, Iga Idunganran was attacked and looted. Soldiers evacuated the Oba. When he spoke about it months later, Oba Akiolu said the looters had carried away two million dollars and seventeen million naira from the palace. He returned to the palace about two months after the riots.
It is a strange thing to hold in your head at once. The same ground has been a fisherman's landing, a pepper plot, a king's home, a burial place, a market, a festival stage and a crime scene. The name has kept only the first chapter, the pepper, and it has outlasted everything that came after.
