People · c. 1810–1887
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Tinubu Square carries her name, but the woman behind it was no simple heroine. Efunroye Tinubu made and unmade kings, defied a British consul, kept trading slaves after it was banned, and ended her life as a chief in Abeokuta.
She was born around 1810, maybe a few years earlier, in a town called Ijokodo in the Egba forest. Her full name was Efunporoye Osuntinubu, and both halves carry a story. Her father, Olumosa, was an Egba man who worshipped Obatala, the god of purity, whose sign is white chalk, efun. So the first name speaks of purity as the root of honour. The second name comes from a journey. Her grandmother Osunsola was a well-off trader in herbs, roots and skins who often went down to the coast at Badagry by boat. Family tradition says that on one of those trips her daughter Nijeede went into labour on the Osun river and gave birth there. The baby was named for the goddess of that water, as if Osun herself had handed the family a daughter.
That grandmother matters, because she is the one who taught the girl to trade. It was a skill she would need. When she was still young, around 1821, the fall of the Owu kingdom dragged the Egba and Owu towns into war. Ijokodo was destroyed, along with many other towns, and the family ran to avoid being caught and sold, which was the fate of many Egba and Owu people in those years. Under the leader Sodeke, they ended up in the new town of Abeokuta in 1830.
By then she had married an Owu man and had two sons. Then the losses came close together. Her mother died, and soon after, her husband died too. She was a young widow in a new town. In 1833 an exiled king of Lagos, Oba Adele, came visiting Abeokuta. The story goes that he was charmed by her, and they married. She followed him to Badagry, the old place of refuge for Lagos kings who had lost their thrones. There, using what her grandmother had taught her and the doors her royal husband could open, she built a strong business in tobacco, salt and slaves.
In time Adele was invited back to Lagos to be king again, and she went with him. He died about two years later, in 1837. A lesser woman might have faded at that point. Instead, Tinubu threw her weight behind her stepson, Oluwole, for the throne, against his rival Kosoko. Oluwole won, and Kosoko was sent away to Ouidah. She married again, this time to Yesufu Bada, also called Obadina, who was Oluwole's war captain, and her trade into Egbaland grew with the king's support.
When Oluwole died in 1841 she backed another candidate, Akitoye, who had once been her brother-in-law. He became king and gave her good trading terms. But Akitoye made the mistake of inviting Kosoko home to make peace. Kosoko pushed him off the throne in 1845, and Tinubu and the other Akitoye loyalists fled to Badagry. Even in exile she was busy, using her money to rally support for a war to bring Akitoye back.
The return came from an unexpected direction. In December 1851, saying they meant to end the slave trade, the British bombarded Lagos, drove Kosoko out, and put Akitoye back on the throne. Akitoye signed a treaty in 1852 that banned the trade. Tinubu simply carried on in secret, swapping slaves for guns with Brazilian and Portuguese dealers. One account in her biography by Oladipo Yemitan describes a deal gone wrong in 1853, after the ban, in which she told the trader Domingo Martinez she would rather drown twenty slaves than sell them cheap. She is said to have owned more than 360 slaves herself.
Her reward from Akitoye included land that is now part of Tinubu Square and Kakawa Street. But other traders resented her power, and the British consul, Benjamin Campbell, asked Akitoye to send her away for the sake of peace.
She was not gone for long. After Akitoye died she came back and supported the next king, Dosunmu. Under him she kept a large guard made up of her slaves, and at times she gave orders that normally only a king would give. Dosunmu began to watch her warily.
Lagos was changing around her. The colonial government welcomed returnees from Brazil and Sierra Leone, the Aguda and the Saro, and the British favoured them in business. In 1855, while Campbell was away in England, Tinubu pushed Dosunmu to limit the newcomers. He would not commit. She was then accused of a part in an uprising against the returnees, in which her husband Bada played a big role. When Campbell came back in 1856 he asked Dosunmu to banish her, and in May 1856 she was sent to Abeokuta. Market women protested, but she went.
Abeokuta, the town she had fled to as a girl, became her stage again. She traded in arms and kept the town supplied with munitions in its war against Dahomey, and for that she was made Iyalode of all Egbaland. A fire in 1865 burned some of her property, but it does not seem to have hurt her much. In 1879 she was still at the king-making game, backing Prince Oyekan for the title of Alake. Her biography records another moment from these years: accused of selling a young boy into slavery, she answered that she had a large household to feed and needed money to do it.
She died in 1887 and was buried in Ojokodo Quarters in Abeokuta. In Lagos, the place long called Ita Tinubu was renamed Independence Square by the leaders of the First Republic, but the old name came back, and today Tinubu Square has her statue. Another stands in Abeokuta. So she is remembered in bronze in two cities, a woman who fought the British for her people's say over their own affairs, and who also sold people for profit long after it was outlawed. Both things are true, and her story is fuller for keeping them together.
