People · c. 1781-1901
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He came to Lagos as a bonded servant and died one of the richest and most powerful men in the town, with a tomb whose plaques were said to be made from melted pennies. His age at death is still argued over.
On Lagos Island there is a tomb with a tall memorial over it, and across the street stands an old family house called Iga Taiwo Olowo. The name means the palace of Taiwo the rich man. The man it remembers began his life in Lagos owning nothing, not even himself.
He was born in Isheri, a community in Lagos. The usual date given is around 1781, though nobody wrote it down at the time, and historians treat it with care. His father, Oluwole, was a high chief of the town, an Olofin, who died in 1809. The name Taiwo tells us one more small thing about him: he was the elder of a pair of twins.
The accounts say that when he came into Lagos he served as an indentured slave, bound to a man called Ogunmade, a placement connected to Oba Osinlokun. The historian Kristin Mann, who studied slavery in old Lagos closely, notes that no one knows exactly when he was freed, or when he stopped being a servant and became a merchant in his own right.
What we do know is whose favour he won. By the 1840s Taiwo had become a protege of Kosoko, Oba Osinlokun's son, who ruled Lagos from 1845. Taiwo used that closeness well. He made trading partnerships with European and Brazilian merchants in the port.
Then, in December 1851, the British attacked Lagos and drove Kosoko out. Kosoko went across the lagoon to Epe, and the British put his rival Akitoye on the throne. Nobody is sure whether Taiwo went into exile with his master or stayed behind. Either way, he came through it, and when Governor Freeman invited Kosoko back to Lagos in 1862, Taiwo found a way to be useful to the new British rulers as well. He would keep on good terms with one colonial administration after another for the rest of his life.
The real turn came in 1861, when Kosoko introduced Taiwo to Governor Glover. Glover liked him and pushed him to trade. The friendship that grew from there made Taiwo one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Lagos.
Glover put him in touch with the firm of G. L. Gaiser, which became his main trading partner and also helped him collect money owed to him by Egba traders. Glover then made him Baba Isale of Isheri, his home town. As Baba Isale he stood as patron and spokesman for the Isheri people. In return, he got something worth a great deal to a merchant: control, ahead of everyone else, of the trade routes and markets of Isheri.
He was not shy about where he had come from. In 1865, he and other Lagos merchants wrote a letter to a British official, Colonel Ord. In it they described themselves as men who had been born slaves and had risen by their own energy. Now, they said, they were slave owners, planters, canoe owners and traders. It is a hard sentence to read today. The men who had known bondage had become masters of others.
Taiwo was also a trader in arms, and he served the colonial government as an emissary. He went as its ambassador to the court of the King of Porto Novo.
When the old war chief Oshodi Tapa died in 1868, Taiwo stepped into his role as Kosoko's chief of business. When Kosoko himself died ten years later, in 1878, Taiwo took over the whole Kosoko party, a faction said to have had at least twenty thousand followers. Its rival was the smaller Dosunmu faction, led by another Baba Isale, Chief Apena Ajasa. The two men fought over trade routes and much else. Ajasa had begun as Oba Dosunmu's ally, but he grew too strong for the Oba's comfort. So Dosunmu leaned towards Taiwo instead, and that helped bring Ajasa down.
In the late 1870s Taiwo was baptised at Holy Trinity Church in Ebute Ero, and took the name Daniel Conrad Taiwo. He had already helped build that church. Holy Trinity was the first church in Lagos with a pastor of its own people, and Taiwo was among the former slaves who gave generously to set it up. He also gave to CMS Grammar School, putting fifty pounds into its building fund in 1867.
He died in Lagos on 20 February 1901. His funeral was led by James Johnson, the assistant bishop of Western Equatorial Africa. It was said that he was about 120 years old. Some people still repeat that figure with pride, but it rests on the birth date of 1781, which no record supports. All we can honestly say is that he was very old and had lived through nearly the whole history of Lagos becoming a British town.
Four years after his death, in 1905, a monument was raised over his grave. It was built by Senhor Jorge DaCosta, a Brazilian-Lagosian master builder. The story told about the monument is a lovely one for a man nicknamed for his money. Its plaques, people said, were made by melting down hundreds of copper pennies.
The family house still stands across the road from the tomb, and it still belongs to his descendants. Among them are Kofoworola Abeni Pratt and Remi Vaughan-Richards. So the boy who came to Lagos bound to another man's household ended as the head of a family house that has outlasted him by more than a century.
