A Time of Troubles: Itan - Legends of the Golden Age, Book Two

By Oladele Olusanya

A TIME OF TROUBLES descends on Yorubaland. Set in motion by the collapse
of the old Oyo Empire, a hundred years of discord unfolds. It is a time
of mayhem, social upheaval and slave raids as the Yoruba city-states are torn
apart by fratricidal war. Warlords such as Oluyole, Ogunmola, Kurunmi and
Ogedengbe, with their ‘war-boys,’ achieve power and infamy in their various
theaters of war from Owu and Ijaiye to Kiriji. Caught up in the chaos are the
author’s forebears, the Warrior from Ife, his son Solesi, the war-boy who came
back home from capture and exile, and Baba Mamu who, tiring of war, takes
solace in his cocoa farm. The story culminates in the bloody defeat of the Ijebus
at Imagbon and the imposition of British rule over Yorubaland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796049459

Oladele Olusanya

Oladele Olusanya was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. Educated at the University of Ibadan medical school, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he is an accomplished artist, poet, music enthusiast, and a passionate advocate of the revival of the history and culture of his Yoruba people. He lives in Dallas, Texas, where he takes time off from writing to run a busy medical practice. Olusanya is the recipient of the 2018 O’odua Image Award.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Oladele Olusanya.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 05/28/2020

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

781025

CONTENTS

A Century of Strife

Chapter 1 A New City by the Sea

Chapter 2 Omo Eko

Chapter 3 The Warrior from Ife

Chapter 4 War Boy

Chapter 5 Solesi of Ikenne

Chapter 6 War comes to Ijebu

Chapter 7 Baba Mamu

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

The Legend Continues

To the patriarchs of my family, Solesi of Ikenne (1850–

1954) and Emmanuel Jonathan Odusanya, Baba Mamu

(1876–1954), whose exploits are herein recorded.

And in memory of my son, Ayodeji Kehinde Olusanya (2012–2016)

Igba ogun l’ode ile Yoruba

Ni a fi ta mi leru

Ti a di mi ni okun

bi eni nde ekute ninu oko;

A ta mi sinu oko eru

bi eni nta agbado loja.

Esan ni oruko mi, sugbon nisisiyi,

nwon fun mi ni oruko Potoki—

Eni ti a ta leru, ti a gbe lo si ilu Brasiili.

Bawo ni ajo mi yio ti ri?

Ibo ni olugbeja mi wa?

Ha! Isoro ati iya nla nbe ni oko eru.

Igba ibanuje ni eyi je

fun gbogbo awa inago

lati ilu karo o jire.

‘Twas war that came

upon the land of the Yorubas

that made me a slave,

I was tied up like a bush-rat,

And like a basket of corn

I was sold in the marketplace.

Esan is my name—

though now they call me a name in Portuguese—

He who was taken to the land of Brazil against his will.

What would become of me?

Would I ever see my native land?

Ha! What pain and suffering it is

to live in the land of bondage;

And a sad time it is for all inago people

From the land of karo o jire.

-Lament of the Yoruba Slave Child Taken to the Land of Brazil.

IMG%2001.jpg

A Century of Strife

T HE STORIES OF the Old Woman tell of an era in which the Yoruba people descended into what she called igba inira , the time of troubles. This was in the nineteenth century, according to the method of counting time by the white man, when the golden age of the Yorubas described in Gods and Heroes came to an end. It was a period that was intimate and contemporary to the Old Woman, for she was born in that century of strife. She bore witness to the stories of discord, war, and slavery that marked that age.

Like those earlier tales of ancient Yoruba gods and heroes, these stories belong in the tradition of the arokens, the ancient storytellers of the Yoruba people that the Old Woman epitomized. Many of these are tales I heard as a child from my grandmother, who herself was a protégé of the Old Woman.

My grandmother Efunyemi was born in Ikenne-Remo in Ijebuland in the final years of the nineteenth century. She regaled me as a child with stories of her famous father, Solesi of Ikenne, who, as a young teenager, went to war as a drummer boy in the Remo army in 1862. According to my grandmother, Solesi was captured in that war and taken to Ibadan. Throughout my childhood, I was intrigued by these stories, including the dramatic tale of Solesi’s escape back to Ikenne and his becoming a great chieftain in his hometown. I also heard stories of my grandmother’s marriage into the polygamous household of Odusanya in Ijebu-Ode, and of the involvement of her husband in the wars and other momentous events of that era.

My interest in this troubled, but stirring epoch of Yoruba history was revived later in life when I read Rev. Samuel Johnson’s History of the Yorubas, which has been compared to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. From that time, I determined to tell these stories in my own voice.

In writing about this era in my epic tale of my family and the Yoruba people, I knew I would have to lay bare the answers to many of the riddles that had intrigued me since my childhood. Who was the warlord that took Solesi to Ibadan? How did Baba Mamu fare as he journeyed to see peace come to Kiriji, a place as distant from Ijebuland as my childhood imagination could conjure? And how did those strutting oyinbo soldiers, administrators, schoolteachers, and priests come to impose their rule over our people from their own country thousands of miles away across the sea?

I knew I had to tell the story as it happened, leaving nothing out. I would follow the precepts of the Old Woman and her protégés as I did in Gods and Heroes. Thus, A Time of Troubles is filled with scenes of war, suffering, and loss, but also of love, redemption, and the search for happiness by ordinary men and women who try to make sense of the tragedy and calamity around them. There is also a story of Agbako, the old Yoruba demi-god of retribution and nemesis of mankind.

On these pages, we meet the major historical figures who played pivotal roles in the history of Yorubaland of that era. These include the British colonialists who helped establish the Colony of Lagos, men like Governor Carter, Consul Campbell, and William Red Beard McCoskry. We learn about the famous obas, Kosoko, Akitoye, and Dosunmu of Lagos; influential native-born merchants like Balogun Kuku of Ijebu-Ode, Madam Tinubu of Abeokuta, and Captain J. P. L. Davies of Lagos; and the warlords Ogunmola, Kurunmi, and Ogedengbe, who made their mark in the various theaters of war that bedeviled that troubled age.

All the battles described in A Time of Troubles took place, more or less as described—from the Battle of Osogbo, the destruction of Owu, and the defeat of Kurunmi of Ijaiye, to the battles fought by the upstart city-state of Ibadan leading to the Kiriji War, and the Battle of Imagbon, fought by the Ijebus in 1892, the pivotal event that paved the way for the imposition of British rule over Yorubaland.

In writing this book, I must admit that I have taken the stories of the Old Woman and my grandmother, and turned them into a novel—what the experts would call a historical novel. It is genre descended from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which was my favorite English novel growing up and a book that used an evocative period of European history to transport the reader wih riveting scenes and timeless characters derived from the imagination of the author. Along the way, my tale departed quite a bit from the traditional Yoruba story that the Old Woman told children by moonlight. For what I have done is to utilize the power of poetic invention to make this my own unique story of Yorubaland in a time of war. It is a device of which I know the Old Woman would approve, though it may not follow strictly her own ideas of traditional storytelling.

As with the other volumes of the Itan: Legends of the Golden Age series, the cover images and chapter illustrations of this book are original art compositions by me and Dipo Alao, my friend and artist of the Osogbo school. And each chapter is preceded by an original verse in Yoruba translated into English. Thus, this book can be viewed as a creative endeavor that provides vignettes, not just of history, but of the enduring arts and culture of the Yoruba people. These are the stories of how those ancient traditions survived that century of strife that we now call the time of troubles.

CHAPTER 1

Eko akete, ilu ogbon

To ba duro ko sora,

Ko si yangi;

Eko o gba gbere,

Eko o gba gbere rara o!

Eko stands aloof,

The island that teaches wisdom to fools.

When you stand in the streets of Lagos,

Look to yourself and beware;

For Eko does not care,

Eko does not care for you at all!

—Traditional song of Lagos.

IMG%2002.jpg

A New City by the Sea

A S THE EMPIRE of the Alaafin disintegrated, many Yoruba city-states followed the example of Ilorin and declared their independence from Oyo. These included the Egba, the Egbado, and even the Awori in faraway Badagry on the coast. With warlords running the newly established Yoruba towns set up by fleeing refugees, at Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ijaiye, and Ago d’Oyo, it was a time of anomy and civil dislocation throughout Yorubaland.

The war chiefs and their war boys went on a rampage. They took over whole towns and subjected their population to their capricious rule. They sent messages to towns and villages to pay ransom, or else they would be attacked and devastated. Towns and villages that did not comply were surrounded, sacked, and pillaged for booty and loot.

The greatest prize to be had were slaves, which were sold at great profit at the slave markets of Lagos and Badagry. There now developed a brisk and profitable commerce in this commodity among the towns and villages of the forest communities where the Yorubas found themselves concentrated after the forced migration from old Oyo. This was because no Yoruba chieftain or important personage of that time thought that the comforts that made life bearable could be complete without the help of slaves to do household chores for his wives, work his farms, and even fight his wars.

As a grim symbol of the culture of the time and of a people in anomy, the institution of slavery became a corrupting and debilitating influence at every level of society and in every town, village, and hamlet of Yorubaland. For the merchants at the coast had made a compact with white men who came across the ocean in great ships to buy the men, women, and children that their people sold for money. These slave traders sent constantly to the hinterland for a steady supply of the commodity that was the source of their wealth.

The procurers at this end were the warlords in whom was incited a greed and avarice for war that was no longer fought for ethnic pride or political alliance, but for undiluted personal gain. The greed of the warlords drove them to wage war solely to capture slaves from among their own people.

In exchange, they received ornaments of brass, silver, and gold to adorn their many wives and concubines. They received bags of cowry shells to purchase luxuries that hitherto were unknown to them. As they sold more slaves, they acquired more bags of cowries, with which they purchased even more luxuries and horses and weapons of war with which to capture more slaves.

This constant state of war displaced whole populations. The very foundation of society was shattered. The sanctity of life was constantly breached. Women were ravished in the sight of their husbands, and their babies slaughtered or carried off at the point of the spear. Kings, rulers, and warlords debased their subjects, and the old gods were dishonored.

As this century of troubles progressed, the slave trade intensified until it became a wholesale commercial enterprise. The central town of Apomu near Ile-Ife became the major slave market in the hinterland. On the coast, it was Lagos or Badagry.

Yet the most influential and wealthy slave merchants were from Ijebu, that part of Yorubaland that straddled the trade route between north and south. At the height of the slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ijebus were the middlemen and major local beneficiaries of the slave trade that decimated the land, though very few Ijebus themselves were sold and bought as slaves. Many Ijebu merchants and chiefs became very rich and powerful from dealing in slaves.

A Balogun of Ijebu of that period was said to have boasted to a white missionary in Lagos thus:

There is no slave market on the face of the earth where a white man or an Ijebu man can be bought or sold.

Our story begins at the brutal scene of a slave raid on a defenseless village in the Yoruba hinterland. It was a spectacle that the comfortable merchants and middlemen in slaves in Lagos rarely saw or tried to imagine.

The scene was a small hamlet, now destroyed and completely wiped off the face of the earth, which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, lay astride the road between the towns of Ofa and Oje, not far from the bigger Yoruba towns of Ijaiye and Ibadan.

As told by the Old Woman eighty years later, it is the story of a brutal attack by marauders on Itanku, a village that was sparsely defended. This story was told to the Old Woman as an eyewitness account by the nine-year-old boy from Itanku named Ogungbayi, who escaped and survived the attack. His father was an elephant hunter who was away on a hunting trip when their village was attacked by slave raiders. The boy’s mother and three siblings—two sisters aged ten and twelve and a boy, a toddler of four—were captured.

Their village, Itanku, was a place noted for its rich dark soil and harvests of agbado, the yellow corn that was sold by its farmers to surrounding towns like Ijaiye and Ibadan for a comfortable profit. In its heyday, it was a quiet place of rest, its peace broken only by the occasional quarrel of gossiping women and the chatter of playful children.

But the day came when the Baale or village head, a farmer named Abijo, was sent a message by Iba, the leader of a group of war boys from Ibadan. Abijo and his vilagers were ordered to pay a ransom of one hundred baskets of cassava, sixty drums of palm oil, and sixteen male and female youngsters to be delivered by a certain date, to prevent their village from being attacked and burnt.

The villagers could not comply. The Baale sent desperately to the nearby towns of Ofa and Oje. But no one came to their aid.

*     *     *     *     *

The slave raiders came just before dawn. They came by foot and on horseback. There were three grown men or war captains leading a heavily armed group of fifty war boys. The oldest of them was a battle-hardened veteran thirty-five years of age. To the others, whose average age was nineteen, he was old. They called him Iba or Baba. They were part of the army of Bashorun Oluyole in Ibadan, a detachment of mounted warriors who normally fought with the seriki.

There had been a lull in the incessant wars that Ibadan fought with its neighbors in those days. And it was understood that at such times, the fighting men could supplement their livelihood and hone their fighting skills by embarking on slave-catching operations, especially those directed at small villages and hamlets that were not under the protection of Ibadan.

First, the war boys arranged themselves at carefully spaced intervals to surround the entire village. They were careful not to leave any gaps through which anyone might escape. Then five of them went in with lighted brands to set fire to the thatched roofs of the huts.

Thus, the first inkling that the sleeping inhabitants of Itanku had of their fate was the smell of burning thatch and the acrid smoke that choked them in their sleep.

They ran out into the waiting arms of their captors. Those who resisted or came out with weapons—mainly cutlasses wielded clumsily by men who were farmers, not warriors—were cut down mercilessly. Abijo, the Baale, was the first to fall, shot in the chest by a young war boy wielding a musket.

Then the war boys went from one burning hut to the other as the sounds of gunfire and the wailing and moans of the wounded and the dying filled the air. They searched and brought out those hiding inside their huts or those who could not come out by reason of infirmity or age. Infants and toddlers were killed off instantly with spear thrusts through the chest. The war boys knew they would not be able to feed them.

Many of the women, particularly the attractive young maidens, were raped on the spot. The three older warriors kept untouched one maiden each for themselves. These three were stripped half-naked and tied to a tree, to await the pleasure of the men at a later time.

After Ogungbayi ran off undetected, he hid behind a bush and watched what was happening to his family. He could see his mother and two sisters already fettered with ropes around their necks, wrists, and ankles. They huddled on the ground as the barrel of a musket carried by one of the war boys hovered over their heads.

Ogungbayi could not see his younger brother, the toddler, Ogunbi. He wept bitterly. All the people he had known all his life, apart from his father, who was away on a hunting trip, were now prisoners of this desperate and heartless band.

He watched as one of the captured young women, who was yet to be fettered, broke away and made for the bushes. She did not go far, as Iba, the oldest warrior, came after her. He easily caught up with her with his long loping strides.

Iba grabbed the maiden from behind with one hand. With the other hand, he struck her on the side of the head with a great blow, which felled her. Then he pounced on her as she lay wailing on the ground, her voice raised in a loud shriek. Ignoring her distracting cries, he tore away her iro with one swift movement. Crouching over her, he sank his teeth into her exposed breasts. This brought an even greater howl from the maiden. And now she displayed a strength that surprised the old warrior. He could not subdue her or keep her still so he could ravish her in peace. In this, he was helped by one of the war boys, a teenager who could not have been older than thirteen years.

His name was Mutiu. Because he was small in stature, he was known as Mutiu Kekere, Little Mutiu. Sometimes they simply called him Kekere.

Barely a teenager, Mutiu was a mere slip of a child. He had a smooth, almost beautiful, oval face with doe-shaped eyes and closely cropped curly hair. He was the smallest in the group, but he was one of the deadliest. Few dared to cross him, known as he was for his viciousness and violent outbursts. Though he was one of the youngest, all the men feared him. Part of the reason for this was that he was the son of the late seriki of Ibadan and therefore was protected in high places.

From a young age, Mutiu had shown himself to be a renegade. Following the footsteps of Mufu, his equally depraved elder brother, Mutiu had left his highborn family at an early age to cast his lot among thieves and vagabonds.

His brother, Mufu, had died violently on the streets of Ibadan five years earlier. It was in a fight over a woman who had been betrothed to him. But his brother’s death had not deterred Mutiu from pursuing a career in the business of violence and death.

It surprised no one that Mutiu ended up in a slave-raiding gang. His brother had been a slave catcher too. Although he was nominally an Ibadan war boy, Mutiu had no appetite for conventional war. He had no desire to defend his hometown, Ibadan, from its enemies. All he cared about was to follow his gang on slave raids and other exploits for personal gain. These frequently involved drunkenness, rapine, and murder.

In pursuing these exploits, Mutiu imagined himself as honoring the memory of his slain brother. In his peculiar, if depraved, way of reasoning, he thought Mufu would have understood. The musket Mutiu carried everywhere he went was the same musket that belonged to his brother Mufu and which, according to eyewitness accounts, had been the instrument of his untimely death. This musket had been given to the young eight-year-old Mutiu by Taju, his brother’s protégé, who had been at the scene of Mufu’s violent death.

Mutiu Kekere was mean and vicious. And he was totally without conscience or remorse. Many of the older men thought he was mad, and they avoided his fits of anger.

This boy, Mutiu, now stepped up. With a vicious sweep of his two arms, he slammed the butt of his musket against the side of the girl’s head. She lay still, stunned.

But this was too much for her young husband, who was watching the scene while he was held from behind by two of the marauders. He broke free and leapt at the old warrior, who was bent on ravishing the girl. The angry villager rained heavy blows with his fists on the crouching figure of Iba, who at that time was trying to pull down his sokoto.

But this was the last thing the enraged husband would ever do in this life. There was a loud bang, followed by the smell of gunpowder and a puff of smoke from a musket shot. At point-blank range, Mutiu, the teenage war boy, had shot the husband in the head with the same musket with which he had brained the dead man’s wife.

As they watched Iba rape the still, unresisting figure on the ground, a madness took over the boys. It was the fever and insanity of war, which sometimes took over the most rational of young men in the thick of battle.

One of them, Taju, a tall muscular lad of eighteen, ran to Iba, his body trembling with heat and lust.

He tapped the old warrior on the back and said roughly, Iba, get off. You’ve had enough.

Then with his two strong hands, Taju gripped Iba by the shoulders. He heaved the older man up and tossed him aside. Then pulling down his own sokoto, he fell on the still, unmoving maiden. Twelve of the boys took their turn ravishing her, among them Mutiu.

But when they had finished and their eyes cleared, only a few of the men and boys experienced any satisfaction or joy at what they had done. They were ashamed and avoided one another’s eyes. It was then that they noticed that the figure on the ground lay quite still in the same spot, unmoving, with no sign of life.

She is dead, said Iba, his senses returning to him.

His voice was low and subdued. It was devoid of his usual brash warrior’s impudence. Now there was a hint of remorse and regret.

He lifted the body, walked some distance with it, and tossed it into a smoldering pile of flame and smoke. This was an unidentifiable structure next to one of the burning huts. It could have been a granary for corn, but now it was covered with burning debris.

Someone noticed the body of the husband who had died trying to protect the honor of his wife. His body lay on the ground next to the very place where his wife had been brutally raped. His head was a mass of blood, tissue, and bone mixed with sand. Crawling ants had gathered, and flies buzzed around the gory mass. One of the boys pulled the corpse feetfirst and dumped it beside his wife in the burning pile.

In the end, the village of Itanku was completely destroyed. This little-known place in the heart of Yorubaland, which was loved by its inhabitants for its dark rich soil and harvests of corn, would now be known only for its brutal extirpation—its very existence erased from the minds of men. The habitation of its captured and slaughtered inhabitants was left in smoldering heaps of ash and burning thatch.

A thick brown smoke hovered over the desolate village as a band of vultures gathered to feast on the bodies of the dead. And as the attackers began to drive their fettered captives before them into the bush, the shrieks of these scavenger birds filled the air, marking the village as a scene of death.

The men looked up. There was no light in the sky. A veritable darkness had descended on the village at noon. For as the vultures circled overhead and the smoke thickened and wafted toward the clouds over the burning village, the light from the sun was cut off. A brooding shadow lay like a fatal canopy over the gruesome scene.

Many of the men of the village who had offered resistance to the marauders still lay wounded on the ground. They were all killed, one after the other, before the slave raiders moved off. Their throats were slit. Two war boys held down each injured man while a third wielded a sharp curved knife, stepping aside as blood gushed from the severed neck artery. The war boys had no need for captives who could not walk unassisted. Many of the older people in the village were left inside the burning huts to perish.

The young Ogungbayi, aged nine, was the only person in the village to escape. He hid out in the bush for five days; but he witnessed the entire scene of horror, brutality, and rape that engulfed his village on that fateful dawn.

Those of the villagers who survived the attack were tied together with stout ropes and leather straps. A few iron chains for the necks and wrists were also produced. Then they were quickly herded into the bush. There, in a nearby clearing in the forest, waiting for the war boys, was a group of slave dealers. There were twelve of them, shrewd, weary-faced merchants and battle-hardened former soldiers. They were heavily armed with muskets, swords, and daggers. Two of them were turbaned Hausas on horseback.

The exchange of goods was swiftly made. The captives were handed over to the slave dealers. In return, the warriors received two crates of guns and ammunition and twelve heavy bags of owo eyo, or cowry shells, the currency of the day.

There was talk among the men of how much they should keep and how much to take back to Ibadan. Apparently, they had to report back to Oluyole, the Bashorun at Ibadan, who received a cut from whatever loot and booty the war boys got from their activities, either in war or unsponsored brigandage and slave-catching capers such as these.

As Ogungbayi watched from his hiding place in the bush, he heard other names mentioned—Ogunmola, Ibikunle, and Latosisa. These names belonged either to the leaders of the group or other war captains in Ibadan whose palms would need to be greased by the war boys.

After this transaction, the war boys went back to the farmlands that surrounded the burning village. They began to cut down the ripe corn on the stalk and dig up the yams in the earth waiting for the harvest. The boys from Ibadan were hungry. They had an army to feed.

The slave dealers also wasted no time. They hastened to be on their way. Quickly, they counted the captives. There were seventy-six in all, twenty-five grown men, forty women, and eleven children above six years of age.

Working in a very rapid and efficient manner, the slaving party produced heavy iron shackles for the wrists and ankles and wooden locks and fetters for the necks of the captives. They quickly shackled the captives together in groups of seven. Then they pulled them to their feet, shouting at them to start moving. They took care that those in the same conjoined group were of roughly the same height, but they did not separate the men from the women. And with a shout of command in Hausa from one of the turbaned horsemen, the convoy moved and headed south in the direction of the coast.

Yala! the Hausa leader shouted again as they moved off.

But the very next day, when they had barely left the burning village behind, the slave convoy was apprehended by a war party under the command of a rising young war captain and native of the nearby town of Ijaiye. He and his group of warriors had been attracted by the smoke from the burning huts and the cries of kites and vultures circling overhead, those opportunists and sensors of death.

They seemed to have appeared from nowhere. One moment, the convoy was trudging along a narrow bush path, the captives in the middle and the armed guards on both sides and to the front and back of them. The next moment, there were armed horsemen on both sides of the long chain formed by the slave convoy, leveling muskets and arrows at them. There must have been at least two hundred of them.

One of the slave convoy guards reached rashly for his gun. There was a loud boom of a musket, and he lay dead on the ground, a great bleeding wound in his chest. The rest of the slave detail kept their hands to themselves.

There were so many of these intruders that they looked like an army, which indeed they were. Many of them rode horses, but most were on foot, armed with bows and arrows. The horsemen carried heavy lances and spears, and many had muskets strapped to the flanks of their horses, which on closer look could be seen to be the small ponies favored by the warriors of Ijaiye.

It was clear that this was a well-trained, disciplined group of warriors. They were from Ijaiye, and they were heard addressing their leader as Kurunmi.

The Ijaiyes were known to be the best fighting men in Yorubaland, after the Ibadans. They gave no quarter and never retreated in battle. Under the leadership of their young leader, Kurunmi, who had already made his mark in military circles for his success against the Fulanis in Ilorin, the discipline and heroism of warriors from Ijaiye were well-known.

Hearing the name of Kurunmi, the slave dealers knew what they were up against. They did not attempt to resist. They had no desire to give Kurunmi’s men an excuse to shoot them down.

The Ijaiye horsemen came nearer. They completely ignored the slave dealers and went straight to the captives. They looked at each man, woman, and child with great interest. Then their leader jumped down from his pony. He was quite young. At that time, Kurunmi could not have been older than twenty-nine years of age.

Are there any of you here, he loudly addressed the shackled captives, who are from Ile-Ife?

A few of the captives shouted back in the affirmative. These were closely inspected. Their facial marks were examined. And they were asked to speak a few words to see if their dialect and accents matched those of Ife.

These lucky ones—and there were just twelve of them—were separated from the rest. Their shackles were removed, and they were placed on the backs of the horses of a few of the riders.

All the while, the slave band had kept quiet, fearful of antagonizing this superior force. But now with part of their lucrative cargo slipping out of their hands, one of them, a Yoruba man with Offa tribal marks, spoke up.

Inwardly, the man from Offa was seething. He was barely able to contain his anger and indignation. But outwardly, he tried to be reasonable. He turned to Kurunmi.

But we have paid good money for these people you are taking away, he blurted.

How are we going to get our money back?

There was a pause as Kurunmi looked at him. The Ijaiye leader appeared to be deciding on a reply. He paused for a moment. But then he turned away, totally ignoring the question. He strode back to his horse, which was eagerly champing on a bit of turf.

Kurunmi mounted the horse. He steadied himself as he held the reins. But the horse kept its head down. It was reluctant to leave the juicy piece of grass it was munching. Then sensing the tug of the reins from its impatient rider, the horse sprang on its hind legs and gave a soft neigh.

Kurumi steadied the beast with a pat on the side of the neck, and the horse put its front hooves down. Then with a movement of his upraised hand, the Ijaiye leader motioned to his men.

Those who had dismounted swiftly jumped back on their horses. They tried to form a rough military formation. But with the thick bush, shrubs, and trees close around them, their efforts were only partially successful. Then without a word and as suddenly as they had appeared, Kurunmi and his men rode away.

What had happened was that Kurunmi, the young war captain of Ijaiye, had a commission from the Ooni of Ife, who was alarmed that slave catchers from Ibadan, Ijebu, and Egbaland were taking as slaves men, women, and children of Ife. This was in spite of a solemn agreement by the leaders of the various Yoruba city-states that citizens of Ile-Ife, the spiritual capital of Yorubaland, should be immune from capture and sale as slaves in any part of Yorubaland.

The Ibadan warlords and their war boys were especially notorious for flouting this agreement. Lately, this had caused friction between Ife and the young Kurunmi of Ijaiye on the one hand and Ibadan under Bashorun Oluyole on the other.

The remaining captives wailed and cried. They pleaded in vain for the Ijaiye horsemen to rescue them too. But their pleas fell on deaf ears. Kurunmi’s men simply told them it was only people from Ile-Ife that they were authorized to release.

As they rode off, following the command of their leader, the Ijaiye men were quiet and orderly. The last the slave group saw of them were the backs of the dozen rescued men and women as they bounced up and down on the horses that bore them to Ijaiye and freedom.

For the remaining captives, the nightmare had only begun. The march to the coast was a horror none of them could ever have imagined.

The slave party kept a brutal pace. Those who tried to slow down the group by their weakness or weariness, or those who straggled, were mercilessly whipped. Their guards had them hidden in the bush during the day and made them travel all night. There was little food for the captives and an even more limited supply of fresh clean water. If any of the captives were pressed and wanted to relieve their bowel or their bladder, they had to do so standing up. The captives were not given water to wash their bodies or clean their teeth during the fifteen days it took them to get to the coast.

Three of the captives drowned at the crossing of the Majidun River near Otta. The other captives suspected that these men and women drowned themselves deliberately to escape the horror and deprivations of a life of captivity.

None of the captured villagers had any idea where they were headed. There was whispered talk among the guards, which was interpreted by the more sharp-eared among the captives that they were to be taken in great houses that moved over the waters to the land of white men across the great ocean.

In the end, sixty-one men, women, and children among the captives from the village of Itanku reached the coast at Badagry in that year 1845. These captives who had survived the forced march through the forest, which was even more gruesome than the horrors of their capture and the destruction of their village, ended up in a slave market on the island of Topo, off Badagry.

The children were immediately bought by various private individuals from Lagos to be used as domestic help in their households. Six of the more attractive of the young females were bought by a trader from Ikorodu. They would be resold as domestic servants and concubines to rich merchants in that bustling and newly important town.

The rest were sold off to the captain of a waiting American ship in a mass auction organized under the auspices of a noted Ijebu slave dealer from Lagos.

This merchant was a young man named Odumosu. He was an agent and partner of the notorious Madam Tinubu, an Egba woman of considerable power and influence then living in Lagos.

*     *     *     *     *

The boy Ogungbayi, who escaped capture during the invasion and destruction of his village, Itanku, got away and joined a group of young refugees he met hiding in the bush near the town of Oje. They were three boys a bit older than him, but all were barely in their teens.

They all had one thing in common. Their parents and families were dead or had been captured by slave catchers. They had no homes to return to. The four of them made their way south by foot along narrow forest paths, passing through abandoned farms and dense tropical bush.

The boys survived by picking fruits and digging up roots along the way. They set traps for small animals and shot many others with crudely made slings. One of them managed to steal a bow and a sheaf of arrows from beside a sleeping warrior after sneaking into a war camp on the border of Egbaland. With these bow and arrows, they shot rabbits, bush rodents, and birds, which they ate with delight.

They scrounged, scavenged, and stole food from farms and hamlets along their way. They kept off the main bush paths. And every morning, they kept the rising sun on their left shoulders so that they went due south. In the evenings, they made sure the setting sun was to their right. They slept in trees at night to avoid detection by any passersby and to escape predatory wild beasts.

One of the boys said he had been told that the activities of slave raiders were less in Ijebuland. And indeed, in that age of upheaval and dislocation all over Yorubaland, Ijebu towns and villages were relatively prosperous and safe. The boys’ plan, therefore, was to cross into Remo from Ibadan territory. They avoided the Egbas. Anytime anyone came toward them, the boys hid in the bushes and listened carefully to the speech and accents of the passersby.

In this way, they reached Remo. One of them died from the bite of a poisonous snake near Ode Remo. Another drowned in the river Olu near Ogere when he was carried away by a strong current.

Ogungbayi ended up in Ikenne. He tasted the water of the Uren river and decided this was the place for him.

His friend Adejuwa, the oldest of the group, who had the bow and arrow and was the wisest and cleverest of the four, went on alone. He declared that he would not stop until he got to Lagos. He wanted to be a servant to a white man on that island, where many had gone before him to make their name and fortune.

The stories of our family tell us that the boy Ogungbayi was apprenticed to a hunter in Ikenne. He prospered and lived to a comfortable old age. He was the grandfather of a prominent friend of my grandmother Efunyemi in Ikenne.

This girl’s name was Iwalewa. Later in life, she became a well-known seer and priestess of Ogun in Ikenne.

*     *     *     *     *

Around the time that Osogbesan came back to Ile-Ife, contemplating the astonishing rise of Ibadan from the ashes of the old Oyo Empire, another town in Yorubaland had begun to make an impact on the story of our people. This town was located four hundred miles from old Oyo. It was on the coast of the great ocean, not far from that sandy beach on which Obari and Aarin were said by the Old Woman to have met the god Olokun.

This town was on an island that was part of a sparsely inhabited region of lagoons, creeks, sandbanks, and small islets that formed the coastline of what white men called the Gulf of Guinea, a great indentation of the coast that bordered the broad Atlantic Ocean on its eastern, tropical shores.

The island had a harbor that attracted seamen who came in great ships from foreign lands. Soon, it became a great center for trade and commerce.

Our people called this place Eko, a name said to have been derived from a Bini word. But the Potoki, or Portuguese, who were the first white men to see it, called it Lagos, which in their language meant the place of the lagoon. That name, Lagos, stuck. It was used over the