Place name · Pre-colonial · Legend
Image: Entrance of Olofa of Offa palace. Offa Kwara State.jpg — AYOOLA,B.F, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Offa remembers its founder through his skill with a bow, keeping an old hunting story inside an everyday place name.
Every town in Yorubaland has a founder, and every founder has a story. Offa's is about a man who was very good with a bow.
His name was Olalomi Olofagangan. He was a prince from Oyo, the tradition says, and a hunter, and his gift was the bow and arrow. In Yoruba, ofa means arrow. So when Olalomi settled and others gathered round him, the place took its name from the thing he was famous for. Offa: the town of the arrow.
We have no portrait of him and no record of his life beyond that story. What survives is his reputation, a hunter whose aim was so good that people named their home after it.
Ask when Offa was founded and the answers are far apart. One account says people were already settling there around AD 1000. Another says about 1395. The truth is that nobody knows, and the archer cannot be pinned to any year.
Offa today is a busy Ibolo Yoruba town in Kwara State, headquarters of its own local government area. Its later history is easier to trace. In the 19th century, as the old Oyo Empire broke apart, Offa found itself caught between larger powers. From 1878 to 1886 it fought a long war with neighbouring Ilorin, which historians still study.
Those wars are a different story, from a different time. But it seems right that a town named after a weapon became known, centuries later, as one that refused to give in.
Say Offa, and you are still saying "arrow". The name has carried the archer's story for hundreds of years.
