Lost history · 1877-1893
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
It started with stolen palm wine at a shrine in Okemesi. It ended sixteen years later on two hills facing each other near Imesi-Ile, where two armies had built whole towns of huts and mud houses, and where the new guns made a noise people turned into a name.
After the old Oyo empire fell, someone had to take its place, and in the middle of the nineteenth century the strongest candidate was Ibadan. It had won war after war. It had won the Osogbo war of 1840 and destroyed Ijaye in 1862. By the 1870s it ruled over a great stretch of land to its east: the Ekiti towns, the Ijesa, the Igbomina, the Akoko and others.
The way Ibadan ruled them is the root of this story. Each conquered town was placed under an Ibadan chief who lived back in Ibadan and was called the Baba-kekere, the little father. In each town he kept an agent, an Ajele, who collected tribute, sent farm produce to Ibadan, levied a tax on every house each week or two, and demanded fighters whenever Ibadan went to war. Some Ajeles were decent men. Many were not. The historian S. A. Akintoye, on whose work much of this account rests, describes Ajeles and their boys seizing farms and crops, taking food in the market by force, grabbing wives and daughters, and growing rich while whole Ekiti and Ijesa towns sank into poverty. This went on for about thirty years.
The spark came in 1877, at Okemesi. A prince named Fabunmi, who led a private band of fighters, was holding a feast with his friends at the shrine of Erinle. The palm wine meant for the occasion was waylaid by Ajele boys. They then came to the shrine with swords and cutlasses, took the food, and began to handle Fabunmi's companion. Fabunmi went home, took his sword, walked to the Ajele's compound, and killed the Ajele and most of the household who could not get away.
The news ran across the east. In town after town, Ibadan officials and their relatives were killed. The Ibadan leader, Aare Latosisa, sent messengers to Fabunmi's uncle, the king of Okemesi, ordering him to put the prince to death. Fabunmi cut off one messenger's head and sent it back to Latosisa with the other.
There was no way back after that. Fabunmi called the war leaders of the east together at Okemesi. Oaths were sworn to fight until Ibadan fell, and the alliance took the name Ekitiparapo, the Ekiti union. Egba, Ijebu and even Ilorin joined against Ibadan, each for its own reasons.
Help also came from far away. Ekiti and Ijesa people living in Lagos, many of them returnees from Sierra Leone and the Americas, had formed an association that by 1876 was called the Ekitiparapo Society. They were meant to be a Christian union, but they were troubled by what was being done to their people at home, and they used a new road through Ondo country to send arms inland.
The first big clash went badly for the alliance. In 1878 Ibadan routed it at Ikirun and drove the Ilorin army into the Otin river, where many drowned. But the alliance did not break. In 1879 the great Ijesa warrior Ogedengbe finally joined it with his large army, and Fabunmi, the younger man, handed him the command.
The armies settled into two camps that would last for years. The alliance camp stood on a hill about forty minutes' walk from Imesi-Ile. The Ibadan camp stood on another hill about an hour from Igbajo. Between them lay a valley and an old road. One stream, the Alapoto, ran through the alliance camp. Another divided the two sides. It had been called Eleriko, but so much blood ran into it that it was not fit to drink, and it came to be called Fejeboyu.
These camps became real towns. About forty thousand people lived in the alliance camp and about sixty thousand in Ibadan's, a great many of them wives and children. The alliance built bamboo huts, kept a shrine to Ogun, the god of iron and war, and ran a smithy to make and mend weapons. People farmed around Imesi-Ile, women traded, and kings sent food to their relatives in camp. Young men kept arriving from all over the east, hoping to be called iyayu, a badge of honour among the fighters.
It was here that the war got its name. The Lagos society brought in long-range guns that Ibadan had never seen, including breech-loading rifles. Their deep, heavy boom echoed between the hills, and people said it sounded like kiriji. Ibadan had to give up its huts and build mud walls to shelter from the new guns, and Latosisa wrote letters to Oyo people in Lagos begging for the same weapons, with little success. Trenches were dug, and a rifle corps was formed. Its leader, Alfred Labinjo, a son of Imesi-Ile living in Lagos, was shot on 13 July 1885 and died about five days later.
Attempts at peace came and went. In 1881 the Ooni of Ife sent envoys to both camps. Both sides agreed on everything except one thing: neither would leave first. A Lagos mission in 1883 failed too, and so did a missionary's visit in 1884. Nobody trusted Latosisa, and those who said they wanted peace often secretly wanted Ibadan crushed.
The deaths of strong men opened the way. In August 1885 Latosisa himself died in the Ibadan camp, and the new Ibadan leader, Osungbekun, could not command the same respect. Both sides were tired. Ibadan had been kept going by guns and powder sold to it by a Lagos chief named Taiwo, and those supplies were now used up.
By 1886 the British in Lagos had their own reasons to want the interior calm. They sent two missionaries, Samuel Johnson and Charles Philips, as envoys. Then on Thursday 23 September 1886, at Imesi-Ile, a peace was proclaimed by British commissioners. Ogedengbe for the alliance and Osungbekun for Ibadan stepped forward and swore eternal friendship.
Even then the camps did not empty. Ibadan kept its outpost at Ikirun, so the alliance stayed watching at Imesi-Ile, and the fight between Ilorin and Ibadan's ally Offa went on. Only on 14 March 1893, after a meeting with a British officer, Captain Bower, did the three last camps finally break up. The war had lasted almost sixteen years. Nobody knows how many died. And the weariness it left behind helped the British take over the whole of Yorubaland soon after.
