Category: History


  • Ogedengbe was the appellation taken by Orisarayibi Ogundamola as an adolescent. He was the 19th Century warrior and liberator of Ekiti and Ijesha people from the domineering power of Ibadan. Ogedengbe was born in 1822 c. in a small village, Atori, within the Ijesha territory. The time of his birth coincided with one predicted by…

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  • Salami Agbaje, industrial magnate of the Ibadan colonial era, son of an early Muslim convert from Iseyin was born in Lagos in c.1867. Agbaje acquired an Islamic education to the exclusion of a Western supplement due to the objection raised by his parents who were at the time contemptuous of Christianity-proselytizing Christian Mission schools. When…

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  • Ara Suicide; In August 1855, the mass suicide in Ara, an Ekiti town, to prevent their enslavement by the ravaging Ibadan army. The act of suicide was first committed by Chief Elejofi, the town’s leader, who with the help of his eldest son, destroyed his house, belongings, many of his wives and children, before taking…

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  • Orunmila was a philosopher, and major intellectual personae of the Yoruba Ifa literary corpus which deals with subjects as diverse as history, geography, religion, or music. Orunmila together with his sixteen disciples is credited with the authorship of most of the four thousand and more verses attached to the Odu Ifa, a record of the…

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  • Aburi Accord in 1966 was the watershed in the series of intrigues that led to the Nigerian Civil War known as the Biafran War. The entire two days proceeding at the round table to fashion solutions to the impasse generated by the coup that killed the Head of State, General Aguiyi Ironsi, was recorded by…

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  • Aro War describes the series of battles between December 1901 and March 1902 in which the Aro tribe of the Igbo nation in eastern Nigeria were subdued by imperial British power. Aro people were in the mid 19th Century known as middle men who carried large quantities of trade goods from Old Calabar to the…

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  • Nri Civilization occasioned a medieval Igbo institution, located in the colonial Awka division. The town of Nri was hypothesized by A.G. Leonard, British royal officer in 1902 as the fountainhead from which all the other clans of Igbo, eastern Nigeria’s tribe of the greatest number, sprung. The culture of Nri, as stated by Onwuejeogwu in…

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  • James Africanus Beale Horton was a pioneer Nigerian medical doctor of full Igbo parentage, born in Sierra Leone in 1835. His father had been settled in Freetown like many freed slaves following the interception of their ship from those who traded in humans. Horton schooled at the CMS Grammar School and the Fourah Bay College. His…

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  • JaJa of Opobo, full name; Jugbo Jubogha, was the charismatic king of Opobo in the Niger Delta who opposed inroad of British trade into the hinterland. JaJa, an Nkwerre man, was born c.1821 in Amaigbo village group, which later became part of the Orlu Division. For cutting his top teeth, an abnormal and sinister phenomenon…

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  • Blood Men is a society of Igbo slaves in the Calabar oil palm plantation formed in 1850 to oppose their encroachment and oppression in the Delta especially the use of their brethren in human sacrifice. The revolutionary movement of slaves grew among the very lowest class, who, to historian Elizabeth Isichei’s chagrin, were supposed to…

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