People · c. 1800-1868
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An orphan from Bida ran all the way to Lagos, asked to live in the king's palace, was sent across the ocean in place of a prince, and came home to become the war chief of Kosoko. One of the best-known names in Lagos is his.
Oshodi is one of the best-known neighbourhoods in Lagos. BBC Yoruba once put it plainly: if you come to Lagos and do not know Oshodi, you do not know Lagos at all. Yet the name is not just a word somebody chose for a place. It belongs to a man, Balogun Landuji Oshodi Tapa, and his life is one of the strangest in the old history of the city.
Tapa is the Yoruba name for the Nupe people, and the story told about him begins far to the north. In the account the BBC gives, he was born around 1800 in Bida, in what is now Niger State, into a royal family. When he was six years old, a civil war broke out in his town and took the lives of his parents. To escape the people who would have made him a slave, the little boy fled south. Somehow, young as he was, he reached Lagos.
But Lagos was no safe place for a lone child either. Afraid that he would be seized and sold there too, he went to the palace of the Oba and said that he wanted to live with the king. A chief named Fagbemi took him in to explain his case.
The Oba at that time was Eshinlokun, the father of the later Oba Kosoko. Eshinlokun did what a careful Yoruba king would do with a stranger. He had Ifa consulted, to find out whether the boy's coming would bring good or harm to the town. The answer was good. So the king took the boy in, put him under Fagbemi's care, and later gave him charge of security in parts of the palace.
The orphan grew into a brave man, and he grew close to the king. The BBC uses a Yoruba image for it: he stayed by Eshinlokun the way a string stays tied to a bow.
Then came a strange request. A well-known Portuguese merchant in Lagos, a friend of the Oba, asked Eshinlokun to give him two of his sons to travel with him back to his country. He promised to bring them home again when he next returned.
The king was not at ease. He did not want to send his own sons. Instead he chose two young men who lived in the palace, Oshodi Tapa and another named Dada Antonio, and handed them over. The BBC quotes an old proverb here: it is someone else's child that we send on errands in the middle of the night. Eshinlokun thought he was keeping his sons safe. He did not know he was keeping a great chance from them.
The two young men did cross the sea, though by this account they ended up in America, not Portugal, and they came back only after many years. They came back knowing how foreign trade worked from the inside. The European merchants took Oshodi into their business and gave him a share of their profits, and he became a rich man in Lagos.
Money did not make him forget where he had started. He stayed close to the Oba, who put him in charge of the quarters of the royal wives. He was the only man allowed to go in and out of those rooms as he pleased and to set things right there.
After Eshinlokun died, his son Idewu Ojulari became king, but he did not reign long. Kosoko should have come next. Instead war and plotting broke out, and in 1836 another man, Oluwole, took the throne. Oshodi stood firmly with Kosoko, the son of the king who had taken him in. The two of them fought Oluwole and held the lower part of Lagos for a time, but Oluwole won, and both had to flee. When Oluwole died, Kosoko's uncle Akitoye was crowned while Kosoko was away, and the fighting began again. Oshodi did not move from Kosoko's side. In 1845 Kosoko drove Akitoye out and became Oba, and Oshodi became his Balogun, his war chief.
Akitoye did not rest. He asked the British to fight Kosoko for him, and they drove Kosoko out of Lagos. Kosoko went to Epe, and Oshodi went with him. Akitoye died in 1853 and his son Dosunmu became Oba, but Lagos still had no peace while Kosoko's house was outside it.
Many meetings were held to bring Kosoko back. The British would not allow it. They said only Oshodi could come home. He refused. The BBC gives the saying behind his choice: the pigeon that eats with the householder does not fly away when hard days come.
In 1862 Kosoko was at last allowed back, after he signed a peace agreement with Governor John Hawley Glover. Glover was pleased with the part Oshodi had played in making peace, and he valued his long experience of Lagos politics. He would ask Oshodi's advice before he did anything.
Oshodi needed a place for his large household, so Glover asked the Aromire family for land at Epetedo. Oshodi settled there and became the governor's representative. His palace stood in the middle of Epetedo, and the area was divided into twenty-one family compounds, among them Oshodi, Akinyemi, Ewumi and Alagbede. Glover also gave him a number of honours for his work for the town.
He did not enjoy the peace for long. Balogun Landuji Oshodi Tapa died on 2 July 1868, six years after coming home from Epe. He left many wives and some forty-six children. He was buried in the middle of Oshodi Street in Epetedo, and a memorial still stands over his grave. The boy who once begged to be taken into a palace now lends his name to one of the best-known places in Lagos.
