Legend · Ancient to present · Disputed
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Ugbo sits barely a metre above the sea, a kingdom of fishermen and salt-makers on the Ondo coast. Its king, the Olugbo, says his ancestors were already ruling in Ile-Ife when Oduduwa arrived, and he says it loudly.
Most Yoruba towns sit on dry ground among hills and forest. Ugbo sits on water. It is a kingdom in Ilaje Local Government Area, on the coast of Ondo State, and its capital is Ode Ugbo. The land is a maze of creeks, rivers and lagoons in the mangrove swamp, at the western edge of the Niger Delta, and most of it lies only one to one and a half metres above the sea. It rains for about nine months of the year. For a long time the only way in was by boat, until the NDDC built a long road across the river some years before 2017.
The Olugbo, the king, says more than 250 communities fall under his authority. Within Ugbo itself there are sixteen quarters, each led by chiefs chosen by custom. One of them, Chief Gbogunron, has a job only he can do: on coronation day he places the ritual leaves on the new king.
Water shapes how people live here. The towns grew out of fishing camps that got bigger and bigger. Along the open sea, houses stand in long lines facing the shore. A little inland, in the brackish water, the lines get broader. Further in, where the water is fresh and the trees are thick, more people live, and this zone is sometimes called Ilaje-Ugbo, Ilaje of the forest. It is where children learn to swim and fish.
The Ugbo are fishermen and salt-makers first, and much of their folklore and many of their festivals are about water, fish, fishermen and the deep sea. They weave fish traps called igere from raffia palm, make and mend nets, and move people and goods from village to village by canoe. They float timber through the lagoons to sawmills at Ebute-Metta and Epe in Lagos and at Sapele in Delta. They distil drink from the palm trees that grow everywhere and sell it across the south-west and south-east. And Ugbo has oil. The Sun reported in 2017 that the crude flowing in Ugboland is the reason Ondo counts as an oil-producing state at all.
Ugbo people and their Ilaje kin are among the most travelled fishing people on the West African coast. They go where the fishing is better, and they have gone far.
In Nigeria you find them leading fishing communities in Ogun State, at places like Ode and Elefan. In Lagos they are in Badagry, Epe, Ajah, Ajegunle, Apapa, Ikorodu, Bariga, Makoko and Ijora. In Delta State they are at Ago-Kutu and elsewhere. There are big Ugbo communities in Rivers, Cross River and Akwa Ibom, and inland at Lokoja, Shiroro and around Kainji. Their boats trade as far as Warri, Port Harcourt, Calabar, Escravos and Bonny.
And then they cross borders. Along the coasts of Cameroon, Gabon, Benin Republic, Togo, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, Ilaje fishermen are known as the experts of deep-sea fishing, the core of the professional fishing crews.
Not everyone still goes to sea, of course. Many Ugbo people today work in banking, teaching, health care and oil and gas, and oil companies like Chevron and Agip have installations in the area. But the pull of the water is in the stories, and in the name of the place itself. The Olugbo told The Sun that when his first ancestor was looking for a home, the Ifa oracle told him to keep going until he found water, fish and salt all together in one place. He found them here, and his people have stayed.
That oracle story is the gentle part. The rest of what the Olugbo, Oba Fredrick Obateru Akinruntan, says about Ugbo's past is a challenge to the most famous story in Yorubaland.
Most Yoruba tell their history from Oduduwa, the founder who came to Ile-Ife. Oba Akinruntan's version is that Oduduwa was not the first. When Oduduwa arrived, he says, he found the Olugbo's ancestors already there. In his telling, it was his great-great-grandfather, Oba Makin Osangangan, son of Oraife, who received Oduduwa at a place called Ile Ero. He says those ancestors spoke the Kedu language that the Ilaje speak, and that it took Oduduwa about sixteen years to learn it. He says his people had seven quarters in Ife and owned its two main markets, Oja Ife and Oja Ayegbagun, and that the Aje of Ife belongs to his house. He says they brought Sango, Obatala and Ogun with them when they left. Go to Ife, he says, and ask for Oke Remo and Ile Ero.
From all this he draws a big conclusion: that the Olugbo's stool is the oldest throne in Yorubaland, and that Ugbo owns Yorubaland. He told The Sun he had more than 200 authorities to quote and had searched archives in Portugal, Germany and London.
These are his claims, and he knows they are fighting words. Plenty of people disagree. In 2019 Gani Adams publicly asked the governors of the South West to call the Olugbo to order. Even Oba Akinruntan's own throne came through a fight: he says the Supreme Court removed the man who held it before him, and he was then presented and crowned.
So Ugbo gives you two stories in one. One is of a hard-working people who live on the water and follow the fish across half a continent. The other is of their king, standing on a metre of land above the sea and insisting that the history books have the Yoruba story the wrong way round.
