Lost history · Mid-19th century to today
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
On the map it is one busy city between Lagos and Ibadan. Underneath, Sagamu is thirteen small towns that moved in together during a war and never quite stopped being thirteen.
If you have driven the Lagos-Ibadan road, you have passed Sagamu. Most people know it as the place where the expressway meets the road to Ijebu, a stretch of trailers, kola sellers and cement trucks. Very few people driving through know that the city they are looking at was put together out of pieces.
Sagamu, also called Ishagamu or Orisagamu-Ewa, is not one town that grew bigger. It is a conurbation of thirteen towns. Their names are worth saying out loud, because each one used to stand on its own: Makun, Offin, Sonyindo, Epe, Ibido, Igbepa, Ado, Oko, Ipoji, Batoro, Ijoku, Ijagba and Latawa. They sit along the Ibu River and the Eruwuru Stream, in what is now Ogun State, and the people are Remo, a branch of the Yoruba who speak their own Remo dialect of Yoruba. Remo people are not only here, either. Large Remo populations live in Ikenne and Remo North in Ogun State, and across the border in Ikorodu in Lagos State. Sagamu is simply where they put their capital.
Look at a list of Sagamu's neighbourhoods today and the old map is still there. Offin, Makun, Epe, Ijagba, Batoro and Ijoku all still appear as named areas, and several turn up again in the names of the political wards the government drew much later. Makun even has a Makun Station. Offin has the palace. The thirteen did not dissolve into one; they pressed up against each other and kept their names.
That is the first surprise about Sagamu. The second is why they came together at all, and it was not for trade or for a king. It was fear, and it goes back to the collapse of an empire.
In the nineteenth century the Oyo Empire, which had held much of Yorubaland together, fell. What followed was a long run of wars across the region. A small farming town standing alone was an easy target.
So the small Remo towns did something practical. In the middle of the century they joined together in one place for defence. That is how Sagamu was founded. It was less a founding than a gathering: thirteen communities deciding they had a better chance of surviving as neighbours than on their own.
It turned out to be good for more than defence. Sagamu sits between the coast and the Yoruba interior, and the combined town came to control the trade routes between the ports to the south and the Yoruba mainland. Goods heading inland and goods heading out to the sea passed through Remo hands. A position chosen for safety turned the town into a gatekeeper.
That lasted until the British arrived. At the end of the nineteenth century the British occupied the city, and Sagamu's hold on those routes was over. But the gathering itself held. The thirteen towns stayed packed together, and what had been a wartime shelter became a permanent home.
There is something very human about that. People run to each other when things are bad. Then, once the danger passes, they find they have built a life where they landed and they stay.
Sagamu is the capital of the Remo Kingdom. Its paramount ruler is the Akarigbo of Remo, and his palace is in Offin, one of the thirteen towns. The palace has not always stood where it does now. The older seat was in a farther part of Offin. Four ruling families are allowed to wear the Akarigbo's beaded crown, and all of them trace their line to the first Akarigbo, remembered as a prince of the house of Oduduwa. The current Akarigbo was installed and crowned in 2017.
So a kingdom with a long line of rulers has its capital in a city that is younger than the crown, and the king's town is really a federation.
What keeps Sagamu busy now sits in its soil and on its trees. The ground underneath holds big deposits of limestone, and that limestone feeds the city's main industry, making cement. Above ground, farmers grow cocoa and kola nuts, and Sagamu is the largest kola nut collecting centre in Nigeria. The kola trade carries its own small industries with it, people making baskets and rope to store the nuts.
Since the 1950s the city has kept growing, pulled along by its spot between Ibadan and Lagos. Nobody agrees on how big it has become. Official estimates from the 1990s and 2000s have been challenged by people in the town, who say the real number is much higher. The college of medicine of Olabisi Onabanjo University is there, and the old local government has been split into three development areas. The boxer Anthony Joshua is listed among its notable people.
Next time you pass through on the expressway, look past the trucks. Somewhere in that sprawl are thirteen old towns that came together because they were afraid, and stayed together because it worked.
