Abeokuta

Abeokuta was founded in about 1830, when Egba people displaced by the wars that followed the collapse of the Oyo Empire gathered under the granite outcrops beside the Ogun river. The name means "under the rock", and Olumo Rock itself served as a lookout and refuge. The leader Sodeke brought the scattered Egba townships together into a single settlement of separate quarters, each keeping its own chiefs — a structure still visible in the town's layout.

From the 1840s Abeokuta became one of the earliest centres of Christian mission in Nigeria. Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society established a station at Ake, among them Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba freed from a slave ship who later became the first African Anglican bishop and helped translate the Bible into Yoruba. The mission brought schools, printing and a literate elite, and the town fought off attacks by Dahomey in 1851 and 1864, victories still commemorated locally.

Abeokuta kept a separate government, the Egba United Government, until it was absorbed into the British colony in 1914. From 1946 Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti led the Abeokuta Women's Union in protests against taxation and the colonial administration; the Alake abdicated in January 1949, though he later returned to the throne. The town has produced an unusual number of national figures, and became capital of Ogun State when it was created in 1976; since then industry has spread along the roads towards Lagos.

Abeokuta is Egba, a distinct Yoruba group with its own history and pride in it, and the Alake of Egbaland at Ake remains a central figure, with the quarters of the town keeping their own chiefs beneath him. Installations, anniversaries and funerals of chiefs fill the streets with drumming, praise singing and processions.

The town's best-known craft is adire, cloth patterned by tying, stitching or starch resist before being dyed in indigo. Abeokuta is regarded as the capital of adire-making in Nigeria, and the pits and workshops of Itoku have worked for generations, though synthetic indigo and factory prints took much of the market from the 1930s. Weaving of aso oke for ceremonies continues as well.

Abeokuta's roll of residents is unusually long: the writer Wole Soyinka, the first Nigerian Nobel laureate in literature, the musician Fela Kuti, who created Afrobeat, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the former president Olusegun Obasanjo and Moshood Abiola, winner of the annulled 1993 election, all have roots here, and the town is conscious of it. Christianity and Islam are both strong, missions and mosques stand within a short walk of one another, and Egungun masquerades still appear in the old quarters. Social life runs on the owambe, the party for a wedding, birthday or funeral, where guests wear matching aso ebi cloth and live bands play juju and fuji.

The 2006 census counted about 449,000 people in the town's two local government areas, and estimates for 2022 put the population at around 735,000, with the built-up area spreading south along the Lagos road. Most people are Yoruba, and Muslim and Christian households live side by side, often in the same family.

The state government is a major employer, with the secretariat, the university and the hospitals, and Ogun State's industrial belt — cement works, food and drink factories and light manufacturing strung along the expressways towards Lagos — has drawn workers and commuters. Trade in the markets, tailoring and dyeing, quarrying of the granite that surrounds the town, and farming of cassava, maize and vegetables fill out the rest.

Life in the old quarters is lived in compounds of low houses on rocky slopes, with markets opening at dawn and the afternoon heat slowing everything down. Newer estates of bungalows behind gates spread along the main roads. Many residents commute to Lagos, an exhausting daily journey that the railway has eased for some. Power cuts are frequent and generators common, and the cost of food, fuel and transport since 2023 is the subject of most conversation.

Abeokuta eats the food of the Yoruba interior, with one local point of pride: ofada rice, the short, unpolished rice grown in Ogun State, served wrapped in leaves with ayamase — a stew of green peppers, palm oil and assorted meats, sometimes called designer stew. It is the dish visitors are most often told to try here.

Otherwise the staples are the swallows. Amala, made from yam flour, is eaten with ewedu, a slippery jute-leaf soup, and gbegiri, a smooth bean soup, with red pepper stew poured over; pounded yam and eba from cassava go with egusi made from melon seeds or efo riro, a stew of greens in palm oil. Goat meat, beef and the cow skin called ponmo are the usual accompaniments.

Mornings bring akara bean fritters and moin moin steamed bean pudding, often with pap. Roadside stalls sell boli, roasted plantain, with groundnuts, and roasted maize in season. In the evening suya grills set up along the main roads, with thin beef skewers rubbed in the peppery yaji spice mix, and asun, smoked goat with chilli and onion, is a bar dish. Palm wine comes in from the villages, and zobo from hibiscus, kunu from millet and cold beer are drunk everywhere.