Legend · 1820s–1855
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When the Owu kingdom fell, a few men smuggled out its crown and walked into exile with it. Then one of them refused to hand it over, because he did not like what hardship had done to his people.
Owu was one of the old Yoruba kingdoms, and its people say their crown came down from Oduduwa himself. In the early nineteenth century its capital was Owu Ipole, a heavily walled town near Ikire in what is now Osun State. The place still exists today as Orile Owu, resettled in the early twentieth century.
The 1820s were a terrible time across Yorubaland. The Oyo empire was breaking apart, and towns were being raided and swallowed one after another. Between about 1821 and 1826 the armies of Ijebu and Ife came for Owu. They wrecked Owu Ipole. Its people abandoned their fortified city and scattered.
Owu tradition remembers how the king got out. Next door was the town of Erunmu, founded by the older brother of an earlier Olowu, and always loyal to Owu. During the war, the Olowu was carried on a man's back, to disguise his escape, from Owu Ipole to Erunmu, guarded by his own royal guards and those of the Oba of Erunmu. When Owu fell, what was left of its army pulled back to defend Erunmu against the Ijebu and Ife alliance.
Erunmu was going to fall too, and the two kings knew it. So they made a plan to save the one thing that mattered more than any town: the royal line and its crown. The Olowu gave the crown to three people. One was a warrior known simply as Akogun, a title something like a commander of defence. Another was Ijaola. With them were a few of the king's closest aides.
Then the plan started to come apart. When the siege of Erunmu began, Akogun was sent to the front to try to turn the battle. Ijaola was sent off to Ibadan with an urgent royal message for Maye, the Ibadan warlord. Before they left, they handed the crown to a man named Oni, a trader and farmer and Ijaola's older stepbrother. His orders were clear. Do not tell anyone where it is unless Akogun and Ijaola are both confirmed dead.
Oni slipped away with the refugees. The Owu survivors moved southwest in groups towards Ibadan around 1826, then crossed the Ogun River and reached Oke Ata, near Abeokuta. At that time Abeokuta was itself a new town, founded only a few years earlier by Egba refugees under the rock of Olumo. Their leader, Sodeke, persuaded the Owu to settle among them, and around 1834 they did, in the quarter still called Ago-Owu.
So now the Owu had a home, people, and somewhere in their midst, a hidden crown. But no king. For twenty-one years there was no Olowu crowned in Abeokuta.
Why so long? The tradition gives a very human answer. The hard journey from Owu Ipole had changed the people. Suffering had made families careless of each other. The ones hit worst were the people of Erunmu, because they were fewer, and the larger Owu groups pushed them aside. Oni watched all this. He decided that if he brought out the crown to people who had stopped caring about their own brothers, he would only be handing power to a tyrant. So he kept his mouth shut.
Meanwhile the other two keepers were lost. Akogun eventually made it to Abeokuta, but he could not find Ijaola or Oni. Ijaola, as it turned out, had gone back to Erunmu and hidden on a farm to avoid capture, and later settled in Iwo, where there was another community of Owu refugees. There he became a trader. Years later, through a travelling Owu merchant who did business in Abeokuta, he made contact again with his stepbrother Oni.
Arrangements were made, and Ijaola moved to Abeokuta. He settled the scattered people of Erunmu together in one place, Ita Erunmu, now known as Totoro after a tree that grew there. Then the three men who had been trusted with the crown, Ijaola, Akogun and Oni, finally sat down together and talked. After that conversation they brought the crown of Oduduwa out into the open.
In 1855, Oba Pawu was crowned at Oke Ago-Owu in Abeokuta as the first Olowu of the Owu in their new home. He reigned for twelve years.
It is worth pausing on how unusual that story is. Most crown stories are about who grabbed power. This one is about a man who had power in his hands, literally, and sat on it for two decades because he judged his own people not yet ready for it. Whether every detail happened exactly as told cannot be proved; the account comes from Owu memory. But it says a lot about how the Owu like to see themselves.
They are proud of a habit of open discussion, too. The Owu describe themselves as "Owu a gbooro gbimo", Owu the people who deliberate together. A recent Olowu, Oba Olusanya Adegboyega Dosunmu, stopped giving out Ogboni titles in Owu Abeokuta, saying the secretive Ogboni society was foreign to Owu culture, and that the palace had its own tradition where any Owu person could take part. The king rules with a council of seven, from the Balogun to the Iyalode, and the Oluroko of Erunmu still sits among them, a seat for the small town that sheltered the king.
Every October the Owu gather for the Omo Olowu festival, a thanksgiving that has also taken in the old New Yam festival. At the 2010 edition one of the guests was a former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who holds the title Balogun of Owu.
