Lost history · 1891-1892
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For years the Ijebu kept the roads between Lagos and the interior in their own hands. In May 1892 a British column of a few hundred men marched into their forest, met an army of thousands in a ravine near Imagbon, and after three hours of fighting the kingdom that had held the door shut was opened by force.
Look at a map of the old Yoruba country and you will see why the Ijebu mattered so much. North-east of Lagos lay a block of thick forest, roughly forty miles by forty, cut by streams that drained south into the lagoon. The shortest roads from Lagos to the big inland towns ran through it. Whoever held that forest held the door.
The Ijebu held it. They were perhaps two hundred thousand people, living mostly in villages and small hamlets cut out of the forest, not in huge towns like Abeokuta or Ibadan. Their king, the Awujale, lived at Ijebu-Ode, which had perhaps fifteen thousand people. The Ijebu were keen traders who travelled freely all over Yorubaland, buying and selling. But they did not let others travel freely through their own land. Goods from the interior passed through Ijebu hands, and the Ijebu took their share.
Our main account of what followed was written from the British and missionary side, and it makes no secret of its view. It calls the Ijebu proud and arrogant, and says a journey through their country could be dangerous to goods or life. It is worth remembering, as we read it, that the Ijebu were doing what traders and states have done everywhere: guarding a road and charging for its use.
The same account records a remarkable Ijebu tradition. Long ago, it says, two albinos were born in different parts of the Ijebu country, a man and a woman. Nobody would marry them, so they were put together in a canoe with food and water and sent away across the lagoon. When white men began arriving centuries later, the Ijebu are said to have concluded that these must be the descendants of the two they had sent off. The missionary writer calls the story absurd, but admits that the Ijebu treated white visitors as though they believed it.
In 1891 matters came to a head. The Ijebu closed the trade route into Lagos, which by then was a British crown colony, and the Awujale shut the Ejirin market, cutting Lagos off from an important source of goods from up-country.
The British tried talking first. In May 1891 the acting governor of Lagos, Captain C. M. Denton, travelled to the Ijebu country with some Hausa troops, many of them men who had fled slavery in the north and been recruited by the British. He came to make an agreement with the Awujale to reopen the road and let goods pass freely to Lagos.
The agreement hardly lasted. According to the account, caravans were robbed, a messenger on his way back up-country was killed, carriers were hindered, and a demand was sent to the chiefs of Ibadan for the heads of two Church Missionary Society ministers, the Reverend Tom Harding and the Reverend D. Olubi. In January 1892 the Awujale was pressed into accepting five hundred pounds a year as compensation for the customs money he would lose by opening the road. Then a white missionary was turned back at the border, and the Lagos government decided to use force.
Before the soldiers left, some Lagos churches held special services of confession and prayer. A few Christians there wondered aloud whether things might have gone differently if they had done more themselves.
The force was small. It was drawn from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, Ibadan and Lagos, with nearly a hundred and fifty Lagos Hausa troops, and it was commanded by Colonel F. C. Scott. On 12 May 1892 the men and their carriers went up the Lagos lagoon by boat and landed at Epe. At Lekki they took on about a hundred and eighty more carriers. Against them, the account says, would stand eight thousand Ijebu men with old guns.
Colonel Scott's own report, printed in the London Gazette that July, describes the march. His column fought its way forward through a string of villages, burning or destroying them as it went. At Majoda there was a sharp fight in which the column's African interpreter, a Mr Willoughby, was killed.
On the morning of Thursday 19 May, after an hour's march, Scott met the whole Ijebu army. It held strong ground on a rise thick with undergrowth, in front of a steep, narrow ravine that ended in a deep pool of running water. The column had to go through it. The path was so narrow that the men moved in single file, in a line nearly two miles long, and the Ijebu attacked it along its whole length.
The fighting went on for three hours. Even Scott wrote that the Ijebu fought with great determination, sending forward fresh relays of hundreds of men whenever losses or spent ammunition thinned their front. In the end the column carried the position. Scott could not count the Ijebu dead in the dense bush. Judging by the huts in their camp near Imagbon, he reckoned their army at seven to eight thousand. His own fighting force was about three hundred and fifty. Later counts put the Ijebu dead at up to a thousand.
The next morning, Friday 20 May, as Scott set out for Ijebu-Ode, about six miles away, he was met by a flag of truce and a messenger from the Awujale asking for peace. The column marched in at about half past eleven and found the town nearly empty, the king there with only a few followers.
A British representative was placed at Ijebu-Ode. The roads were opened, and before long, the account says, every road in Yorubaland was open to trade. Churches and schools followed. The missionary writer called Ijebu one of the open doors to education and Christianity, and then added, almost in passing, that those doors had been opened by a military expedition.
