Legend · c. 1416 (traditional) to present
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
A king who would not shut one of his gates, an Alaafin who lost two wars and then sent his daughter, a basket of raw eggs, and a four-eyed fish that will not show up on a camera. This is how the people of Omu-Ekiti tell their past.
Omu-Ekiti is a quiet town in Oye Local Government Area, about forty-five minutes' drive from Ado-Ekiti. When the journalist Rotimi Ojomoyela of Vanguard visited in 2017, he described it as a sleepy place. But the people there will tell you it was not always so. Once, they say, it was a great kingdom.
Its king carries the title Owajumu. The man on the throne in 2017, Oba Ogundeyi Joseph Adeyeye, explained first where the name came from. From very early times, he said, the town was full of traders coming and going from near and far. Business was so lively that the founders named the place Omu, which in the local Ekiti speech means a place with many people moving here and there.
In those great days, the king said, Omu was so large that sixteen roads led into it, and every one of those roads had its own gate. The farmers and traders were successful. Then, around the year 1416, as the town remembers it, an Alaafin of Oyo was pushing his rule into the inner parts of Yorubaland.
The Alaafin sent a message to Omu. Close one of your gates, he said. To us it sounds like a small request, but its meaning was plain enough. It was a demand that Omu accept that it took orders from Oyo. The Owajumu of the time refused. He sent back word that he too was a powerful king, and that he did not take orders from the Alaafin.
The Alaafin was angry, and he went to war against Omu. Twice his armies came, and twice, the king said, they lost. So the Alaafin changed his approach. He reached out his hand in friendship. Now that I see you are as powerful as I am, he said in effect, let us be friends instead.
And in those days there was a well-known way to seal a friendship between two kings. One gave the other his daughter in marriage.
The Alaafin sent one of his beautiful daughters, Adetutu, to be a wife to the Owajumu. She lived with him for many years and bore him two lovely children. All that time, the story says, she was quietly working towards one thing. She wanted the secret of Omu's warriors.
In the end she got it out of the king. Then she slipped away in secret, went back to her father, and told him. Before the Owajumu understood what had happened, the Alaafin's army was at Omu again, and this time it knew how to win.
The secret, the present king explained, was raw eggs. Omu's hunters and warriors were so strong in charms that they had no need of guns. They carried only big sticks. They would speak incantations, and their enemies would fall down dead. But raw eggs could make those charms powerless. So the Alaafin's warriors came carrying baskets of eggs. They threw the eggs at Omu's fighters, the charms failed, and the town was conquered and left almost empty.
The people of Omu scattered. Some fled to Erinmope, a border town between Ekiti and Kwara. Some set out to go back to Ife, where the king says all of them had come from in the first place. On the way some stopped at Ikoro and never left. The head of the house called Ile-olomu there, he said, was the head of Omu's warriors at the time of the disaster. Others reached Aran-orin, in what is now Kwara State, settled with the Aran people, and their place is known today as Omu-Aran. Still others settled close by, and became Omu-oke.
The fall left more behind than a scattered people. In the outskirts of the town, in a small stream called the Iwereji river, there is said to be a fish with four eyes. The king told Vanguard that people had tried to understand it but nobody had. What makes it stranger, he said, is that if you try to take a photograph of the fish, it will not appear on your device.
The only explanation the town has, he said, goes back to the defeat. When Omu was betrayed and beaten, some of its very powerful warriors are said to have gone into rivers, thick bushes and trees, and those places are still marked by strange happenings. Deep in the forest there is another river where, at midday, you may see clothes spread all over the bank to dry. Nobody lives within at least a kilometre of the spot, so who washed them? When the clothes are dry, they simply vanish. It was into this river, the story goes, that one of the old kings, Oba Adewa, went when the Alaafin's warriors defeated him.
The town still remembers its founders every year on Omu-Ekiti Day. Those founders were mainly hunters, so hunters lead the festival. When Vanguard visited, the head of the Ogboni there, Chief Fagbemi Amos Sunday, led the hunters through the rites. Each hunter brought out a kola nut and used it to pray for himself, his family and the town.
The festival falls on a market day. Omu holds its market every five days. Early in the morning a hunters' masquerade called Iyawo Ode, the hunters' wife, whose own name is Alayehun, goes into the market. Traders give him a little of their goods, and he prays for a good harvest to come. In the evening he comes out again, purely for joy, singing ijala, the praise songs of hunters, and dancing round the town with the hunters following behind. The man who plays him does not hunt himself. He is there because he is gifted at entertaining.
The town has more than a hundred hunters, and they told Vanguard that whenever strange things happen, or trouble comes to the farms, the town still calls on them. They know the forest. In a town with a fish that cameras cannot see, that is a useful thing to know.
