Legend · Ancient to present
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
Ire-Ekiti says Ogun came home from war hungry, found his people drinking and was not greeted. What he did next was so terrible that he chose to leave the world, and one family has kept his memory ever since.
Ogun is the Yoruba god of iron and war. Many towns honour him. But Ire-Ekiti, a town in Ekiti State, holds a special claim: Yoruba tradition says this is the place where Ogun went into the earth. Every year the town remembers it with the Ogun Onire festival, and in 2019 one of the men at the centre of that festival, Chief Johnson Fagbamila, told the Daily Sun how it all happened, as his family has passed it down.
He began right at the beginning of the world. When the deities came down from the sky to the earth, he said, they were 201 in number, and Ogun went ahead and cleared the path so the others could follow. Some of the people who followed Ogun were the Iju people, Fagbamila's own people. They first settled at a place called Ona Aaro, the morning path, or the path of the pioneers. That spot, he said, is where St John's Anglican Church in Ire-Ekiti stands today.
Ogun settled his people there and then went away on a military campaign. Before he left, he had set up a regular gathering at a spot called Ajeoku. It was named Ajo Oriki, and it came with a strange rule of his own making. At that meeting, nobody was to greet a passer-by or exchange pleasantries with a stranger. Hold on to that rule. The whole story turns on it.
Ogun was gone a long time. When he did not come back, his people went looking for him. Then one day, at Ajeoku, they held their meeting as usual. They had eaten pounded yam and drunk palm wine, and they were sitting back, laughing and relaxed, when a tired man came walking past. It was Ogun, home from war, hungry and thirsty. Following his own instruction, they did not greet him. They did not invite him to sit. They did not offer him a drink.
Ogun was angry at what felt like a cold welcome. He looked through their gourds for palm wine or anything to eat and found nothing left. That made him angrier. He decided to teach them a lesson, and in his fury he cut off the heads of some of them while the rest ran away.
When his rage cooled, he set off for Ona Aaro, where he had left his people, not knowing they had moved. On the way he met a man coming back from his farm, eating roasted yam and carrying palm wine. This man knew him at once. He greeted Ogun properly, sang his praise songs, and shared his yam and his wine.
Fagbamila also gave a second version. In this one, the people at the meeting challenged the stranger poking through their empty gourds, because they did not know who he was, and Ogun began killing them. Then one man stopped and thought that only Ogun could be so strong. He held out his leftover palm wine and roasted yam. Ogun asked what they had been doing, and the man explained that they were keeping Ajo Oriki. As Ogun asked more questions and heard the answers, he understood. He had killed his own people over a rule he himself had made. Only then did he tell them who he was.
In both versions the ending is the same. Ogun told the man that after what he had done in anger, he no longer had the moral courage to live among his people. He named the man Elepe, the one who calms, because he had soothed Ogun and helped him see his mistake. He told him to call on him, praise him and sing his songs whenever the people needed him to fight for them. Then Ogun sat down on his sword and disappeared into the ground. Fagbamila was firm about this part: Ogun did not die a natural death, and nobody killed him. He chose to go into the earth.
Two sayings came out of that day. One means that it is the person who recognises Ogun who can call on him in Ire. The other says that the Elepe owns Ogun, that anyone uninitiated is only worshipping a log of wood, and that Ogun dresses himself in palm fronds.
The man with the roasted yam, Fagbamila said, was his own forebear, and that is why he holds the office of Elepe today. He is also the head of Iju Quarters. He keeps a carved image called Iya Ogun, which stands for Ogun, along with others called Orangun and Obuntun, and he carries them to Imeru, the Ogun grove, where the town honours its warriors and ancestors, Ogun first among them.
On festival day his work starts at about four in the morning. He must visit the shrine three times before daybreak, pouring libations, offering sacrifices and praying for the town, for the Yoruba and for Nigeria. Because Ogun fought for justice, he said, he prays for peace and justice. At a place called Ulolusi he breaks kola nuts and sends some to the Aworo Ogun, another keeper of the tradition, who may only begin his own rites once that is done. In the evening, when everything is finished, the Elepe eats the new yam, and the celebration opens up.
The festival had a problem, though. Young men had made a habit of caning each other hard and testing their juju charms on one another's bodies, and it often got violent. In 2019 the Ekiti State government helped the organisers, the Ogun Onire Carnival Promotion Forum, to rework it. Canes were replaced with palm fronds, the very robe of Ogun in the old saying. There was a town clean-up and public lectures on values. The forum even made the name into an acronym: Our General Universal Nationalist. Ogun's favourite foods were sold to visitors, palm wine, roasted yam, plantain, dog meat, bean cakes, and pounded yam with a vegetable called rorowo.
That year the caning and juju-testing were far less common, and the crowds came to watch the dancers act out Ogun's story in costume and song. It was a long way from the bloody day at Ajeoku, which may be the point.
