By Temitope Lakisokun Osun State was created thirty-five years ago, but what if I told you the state was born, indirectly, from an insult. Yes, really. In 1945, Chief Salami
By Temitope Lakisokun
Osun State was created thirty-five years ago, but what if I told you the state was born, indirectly, from an insult.
Yes, really.
In 1945, Chief Salami Agbaje, one of the wealthiest Nigerians of his generation, wanted a double promotion in Ibadan’s elaborate chieftaincy hierarchy. Agbaje was no ordinary chief. He was an early beneficiary of the changing colonial economy. He understood the possibilities of banking, international trade, cash crops, education, property and enterprise, and had accumulated a fortune that made him an unusually influential figure in the city. He was the first Ibadan man to own a car, built the city’s first cement-brick house and later constructed a magnificent mansion at Ayeye, reportedly inspired by the Lloyds Bank headquarters in London.
His wealth, predictably, was a source of envy among some of his fellow chiefs. He had also risen through the chieftaincy hierarchy rather quickly. By 1945, he was angling for a promotion that would move him closer to the throne.
With Agbaje’s sights set on a further rise up the chieftaincy ladder, he turned to traditional rulers from the Osun area to plead his case with Oba Abass Aleshinloye, who was the first ruler of Ibadan to be styled Olubadan, an upgrade from Baale of Ibadan. Several respected royal fathers agreed to intervene.
So, on a bright morning in May, the royal emissaries rolled into Ibadan.
And then came the insult.
They were not immediately offered seats when they arrived at the palace. No kolanut was presented. No water was brought to them after their journey.
One of the visiting Obas eventually asked what they had done to deserve such treatment.
An impertinent member of the council replied:
**“Ijoye Ibadan, bi oba ile e ’bomii ni.” **(An Ibadan chief is the equal of a king elsewhere)
The precise nuances of Yoruba idiom are difficult to carry into English, but the contempt here is unmistakable. The visitors had come as royal representatives from other Yoruba kingdoms and towns and were being treated as though their status counted for nothing.
Interestingly, the mission itself succeeded and Agbaje got his promotion.
But something else happened that day. The Osun traditional rulers decided enough was enough and they resolved that they must cooperate to get the Osun area out of the jurisdiction of the Ibadan Native Authority.
By 1949, the Ibadan chiefs had become sufficiently alarmed by Agbaje’s rapid rise that they enlisted a young Adegoke Adelabu (Penkelemesi) to draft a petition against him. It was dated 27 December 1949.
It was quite the petition.
The charges ran to fourteen counts, including “Injustice,” “Selfishness,” “Avarice,” “Exploitation,” “Deceit,” “Vindictiveness,” “Machination,” “Ruthlessness,” “Ambition,” “Tyranny,” “Treachery” and “Unpopularity.”
The petitioners then declared:
“We are no alarmists, but our common heritage, won with the blood, the sweat, and the tears of our forefathers, is about to be delivered into the hands of a tyrant beside whom Nero and Caligula would pale into insignificance”
The colonial government appointed Hugh Louis Montague Butcher to investigate the allegations against Agbaje and the administration of the Ibadan Native Authority. He found the allegations against Agbaje unfounded.
He then turned his attention to the political system itself.
His verdict was devastating. Power, he said, had become concentrated in the hands of:
“a few aged and senile chiefs who owe their position not to ability or intelligence but to having lived longer than their fellow men.”
There was no traditional reason, he concluded, why the Timi of Ede or the Ataoja of Osogbo should remain subordinate to the Olubadan of Ibadan. The arrangement had originated in military necessity and had simply been carried over into civil administration after that necessity had disappeared. Butcher recommended that the Divisional Council be abolished and the districts reorganised as superior Native Authorities.
On 12 July 1951, the central government in Lagos announced that the majority of the inhabitants of the Northern Districts had made it clear “beyond doubt” that they were strongly opposed to remaining under the administration of the Ibadan Native Authority, and that it was in the best interests of good government that they should no longer do so.
The petition had been intended to stop Agbaje.
Instead, it delivered the Osun people from the yoke of Ibadan.
In the social sciences, they call that the law of unintended consequences.
Osun is a young state made up of very old places
We cannot draw a straight line from that episode in Ibadan to the creation of Osun State in 1991, because the administrative arrangements changed repeatedly. The British called the territory Oshun Division, adding an “h” to the name now rendered Osun, or Ọ̀ṣun in Yoruba orthography. The Western Region became Western State. In 1976, Western State was broken up and the territory that would eventually become Osun was incorporated into Oyo State.
Only on 27 August 1991 did Osun emerge as a state, but the underlying political sentiment has always persisted.The Osun political identity was forged through a long refusal to accept subordination as the natural order of things.
Osun is a place of many old centres rather than one overwhelming centre. It is also a young state made up of ancient places. The map is 35 years old, but the people are centuries older. Every town, village, or even hamlet has a history, and an origin story. These communities did not suddenly become a people when the military drew a boundary around them in 1991. They arrived with their own institutions, customs, values, loyalties, memories, social mores and ideas about how they should be governed.
Perhaps this explains why a state composed of so many centres of identity has never been particularly hospitable to the idea of a “capo di tutti capi” – a “boss of all bosses.”
The initial resolve to reject Ibadan’s sub-imperialism reflected that political pluralism. By the early 1950s, four Obas had emerged as the principal movers: The Ataoja of Osogbo, The Timi of Ede, The Akirun of Ikirun, and The Olokuku of Okuku. When it came time to agitate for state creation, educated elites joined them. Different communities pursued different political interests. They did not always agree. The Ijesa wanted Obokun State. Ife wanted Oduduwa, or Moremi State. Ogbomoso wanted the capital of the proposed Osun State. Ede wanted it. Ife wanted it.
Osogbo eventually prevailed.
The Ogbomoso argument encountered a distinctly Osun form of resistance. Those opposed to making Ogbomoso the capital invoked the proverb:
**“A kò lè gbé omo Obà fún Òsun.” **(One does not entrust the child of Oba to Osun)
The River Oba, which flows through Ogbomoso, is a tributary of River Osun. The argument was that a “child” of a different river could not be placed under the custodianship of a capital city belonging to another. This was how Ogbomoso decided to remain in Oyo State.
The political inheritance of Osun is progressive
The Oshun Division was one of the strongholds of the Action Group. There is also an intriguing coincidence, although I suspect “coincidence” does not quite capture it.
Oshun Division was created in 1951, the same year in which the Egbe Omo Oduduwa gave birth to the Action Group. The two developments were closely connected to the political reorganisation then taking place in the Western Region. The new division created a political space in which the people of the Osun country could organise and speak more directly for themselves, while the emerging Action Group provided a political vehicle through which the wider aspirations of the movement could be realised. Action Group leaders, including Chief Obafemi Awolowo, supported the campaign for Osun’s separation from Ibadan.
What is striking is the timing. The Butcher inquiry and recommendation reached their decisive stage in March 1951, just as the Action Group was emerging into public view. The party was introduced to the public through the press on 21 March and formally inaugurated at Owo on 28 April.
The Action Group won, and the Western Region subsequently became the site of one of Nigeria’s most ambitious experiments in regional development.
Two different political developments were therefore unfolding almost simultaneously: an old administrative order was being challenged and redrawn, while a cultural movement was finding an electoral and political vehicle.
The Osun Obas had turned their shabby treatment in the royal court of Ibadan into a challenge to overturn the status quo. Their optimism and tenacity may even have helped create the political climate in which the wider Yoruba movement moved from cultural organisation into electoral politics.
The progressive inheritance of Osun is not simply that its people have resisted domination. It carries an implicit covenant that government must have a purpose. Education, infrastructure, agriculture, and social development are part of what political power is for.
That expectation should not disappear simply because contemporary politics has become somewhat transactional.
Those who seek to lead Osun may want to remember that they are inheriting a political tradition in which government was expected to build something.
Eight decades on…
The insult in Ibadan happened in 1945. HLM Butcher in 1951 examined the political arrangement and found that the subordination of the surrounding districts to Ibadan had no traditional justification. Forty years after that, Osun became a state.
Eighty-one years later, the Osun story still offers a lesson in how a people can organise, persist, and eventually reshape their political arrangements through patience and collective resolve.
There is a version of a praise chant to Ọ̀ṣun, the Yoruba goddess associated with the river from which the state takes its name:
“Ẹ má ṣe yẹ̀yẹ́ o, ẹ má ṣe yẹ̀yẹ́ awa.
Ọ̀ṣun kò yẹ̀yẹ́ o, Ọ̀ṣun kò yẹ̀yẹ́ yín.”
It is rendered as a warning against mockery: do not mock us; we reject your mockery.
The state, of course, was named for the river, and not the goddess. But the cultural world that gives meaning to both is still very relevant. And there is something almost eerily appropriate about that old invocation appearing in the history of a place whose modern story began with an insult.
The people of Osun have repeatedly demonstrated that underestimating them is a miscalculation.
Osun le tente!
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A personal note
I write this as someone whose roots are in Osun on both sides of my family. My patrilineal ancestors migrated from Oyo-Ile to Modakeke in the mid-1840s. In 1909, they moved again and later settled in Odeomu, where my late father was given the traditional title of Apesin in 1982. On my mother’s side, my ancestors came from Ile-Ife and Iresi.
That personal connection eventually became an intellectual one. I have spent years studying the history of Osun, particularly the long struggle for political autonomy, the people who led it and the political choices that eventually produced the state. My book Courage and Character: The Definitive History of Osun State grew out of that work, drawing on archival research and interviews with surviving participants in the struggle for statehood.
The more I studied Osun’s history, the more I came to see certain patterns in it: a strong sense of dignity and self-regard; a willingness to negotiate without surrendering principle; a patience that should not be mistaken for passivity; and a tendency to remember what happened before.
I write as one who claims Osun twice over – by birthright as a proud daughter, and by scholarship as a historian of its making.
Lakisokun, a political consultant, and Chair of Trustees of the Tarihi Trust Foundation, writes from Lagos, Nigeria.
Courage and Character: The Definitive History of Osun State (The Erudio Alphabet Company, 2023, 465pp) is available at RovingHeights Bookstores.
