How Oyo and Ibadan Fell Under British Protection in 1893

In February and August of 1893, two of Yorubaland’s most powerful states, Oyo and Ibadan, signed treaties placing themselves under British protection, closing out sixteen years of civil war and opening the way to full colonial rule.

The war that preceded these treaties had consumed Yorubaland since 1877, when a trade dispute between Ibadan and the Egba escalated into a rebellion that drew in Ekiti, Ijesa, Ilorin and eventually Ife against Ibadan’s dominance. The main fighting settled into a grinding stalemate at Kiriji, near Ikirun, between Ibadan’s forces and the Ekitiparapo alliance under Ogedengbe of Ijesa, a front line historians describe as barely moving for years despite repeated attempts at mediation by the Alaafin of Oyo, the Ooni of Ife and British-backed missionaries. Colonial administrators in Lagos initially stayed out of the conflict on instructions from London, even as it strangled trade routes the colony depended on, and early peace efforts, including a treaty brokered in Lagos in 1886, collapsed within months.

British policy shifted after 1886, driven by a mix of commercial frustration and, as the scramble for Africa intensified, fear that France would move into the vacuum first, a concern sharpened by a French company’s brief and ultimately unratified 1888 treaty with Egba chiefs over a proposed railway to Porto-Novo. Governor Gilbert Thomas Carter, who took charge of Lagos Colony in February 1891, pursued a far more aggressive policy than his predecessors, opening with a military expedition against Ijebu in 1892 to force open the trade roads to the interior.

With Ijebu subdued, Carter toured Yorubaland in person in 1893 to extract formal treaties from the remaining powers. Egba chiefs signed first, in January 1893, agreeing to keep trade routes open in exchange for a British pledge to respect Egba independence, a treaty framed, notably, as protecting rather than annexing Egba sovereignty. The Alaafin of Oyo, Adeyemi I Alowolodu, signed a treaty of protection with Carter on February 3, 1893. Ibadan proved the most resistant: its chiefs initially refused Carter’s terms on March 26, 1893, reportedly out of fear that enslaved people within Ibadan would use a British Resident to claim their freedom, and it took Carter trekking to Yoruba towns further east, including Igbajo and Oke-Imesi, before Ibadan’s Baale, Fijabi, finally signed on August 15, 1893, in the presence of British officers Denton and Bower. For securing these agreements and ending the long war, Carter was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George that June.

The 1893 treaties did not immediately deliver the full control Britain wanted. Two years later, when a British officer named Bower presented Alaafin Adeyemi with a fresh set of demands, including that he surrender arms and prostrate before accepting a permanent British Resident in Oyo, the Alaafin refused. Bower responded by invading Oyo with a small armed force in what became known locally as the “Pepe War,” named for the crackling sound of British gunfire; after roughly a week of fighting and the Alaafin’s brief flight from his palace, a truce was brokered and Oyo submitted fully to British oversight. Ilorin held out longer still, falling only in 1897 to forces of the Royal Niger Company. By the end of the 1890s, the process Carter began in 1893 had brought effective colonial administration across nearly all of Yorubaland.