The Black Prides

IDU-OKOLIKO, A HUMAN TURNED WATER IN IGALA KINGDOM

Ídú (different from the pronuciation as Idu as lion) is an Igala word or name meaning task, work or responsibility. Ídú Okoliko according oral sources was said to be one of the wives of Attah Abutu Ejeh, the Attah Igala after Attah Olema II and before Attah Amichi (Ebulejonu). Just like Ideya, the wife of Attah Ayegba Oma Idoko who was buried at Okpachala ogbagbada due to her kind of evil related death, when ídú Okoliko died, she was taken down to around the side of the popular Ega market in Idah where she was buried. It is just about 0.2Km from the location where Princess Inikpi was buried alive during Igala-Benin war of 1515-1516.
It was found out that after some days after her burial, the dry land started get wet little by little until the area became a river.
But in Igala land, every strange occurrence must be investigated spiritually. And, the Attah diviner, the Ohioga Attah, who is the one in charge of Ifa had to consult the oracle on request of Attah Abutu Ejeh.
It was then the woman revealed to Ohioga Attah that she turned to water to heal people of sickness, washes barred womb, cleanse People, and for general protection where her water is taken to as a deity or goddess. Till date, the Idu Okoliko river or goddess is very effective.
The traditional ruler in charge of Ídú Okoliko is titled Onu Ídú Okoliko, and is greeted Awuhi Attah. HRH Chief Gambo Ahmadu Ibrahim is the present Onu Idu Okoliko. The goddess is still with the Agaidoko clan of Illah-Delta state till date. The deity is also with Igala people of Igara-Edo state and in different families who believe in her and that she is working for them across different communities.
That is not all, in respect of the cleansing power of Ídú Okoliko river, any Igala traditional Ruler beaded newly must go to the water and dip his or leg inside in order to get cleansed and be protected from future evil in the course of the ruling role. This is irrespective of the person's religion as this is a mandatory aspect of the installation. Sick people still bath in it till date and they get healed only if the believe, sources told me.
Have you been to this healing river? You don't need to bath or insert your leg into it, just visit her, yes, visit the human turned River and see it yourself.
Notify me to let our Tourist Guard accompany you and give you the full lecture.
God bless Igala Kingdom.

"I am proud of myself": Nigerian lady bags first class degree from Cambridge Oyin Olukotun, a beautiful Nigerian lady who failed her entrance exams into Cambridge three years ago, has now graduated from the school with a first class.

HOW BANNISHED BENIN PRINCE BECAME THE KING OF ILE-IFE

EDO KINGDOM

Benin Was first Igodomigodo and Greater than Ife(Oduduwa) Igodomigodo kingdom Was the greatest Ogiso and first King in West Africa Region to receive foreign traders.The Last Ogiso Son who was to succeed his Father was banished from Edo and arrived Yoruba kingdom and was crowned as the king of Ile Ife. Izoduwa in Edo Language which is corrupted to Oduduwa in Yoruba understanding. The Powerful Kingdom in Nigeria and first Empire recognized by foreign traders was (Ubini) Edo Kingdom. Edo King capture many towns such as Eko which is now Lagos and also capture Ijebu and Edo Kingdom were stretch from Ijebu and Lagos to Republic of Darhomey which is now change to Republic of Benin. Respect for the priestly functions of the oni of Ife was a crucial factor in the evolution of Yoruba ethnicity. The Ife model of government was adept and derived its military strength from its cavalry forces, which established hegemony over the adjacent Nupe and the Borgu kingdoms and thereby developed trade routes farther to the north.

Edoland established a community in the Yoruba-speaking area east of Ubini before becoming a dependency of Benin Kingdom at the beginning of the 14th century. By the 15th century it became an independent trading power, blocking Ife's access to the coastal ports as Oyo had cut off the mother city from the savanna. Political and religious authority resided in the oba (king) who according to tradition was descended from the Ogiso dynasty in Benin Kingdom. Benin, which may have housed much inhabitants at its height, spread over large square km that were enclosed by concentric rings of earthworks. By the late 15th century Edo Kingdom was in contact with Portugal (see Atlantic slave trade). At its apogee in the 16th and 17th centuries, Edo encompassed parts of southeastern Yorubaland,and the western parts of the present Delta state.

IGBO STATES

The Nri Kingdom in the Awka area was founded in about 900 AD in North Central Igboland. The Nsukka-Awka-Orlu axis is said to be the oldest area of Igbo settlement and therefore, homeland of the Igbo people. This ancient kingdom is still considered the cradle of Igbo culture. The Nri people are children of the historical and mythical divine king Eri (founder of Aguleri of the Umueri clan on the Anambra river valley). It was a center of spirituality, learning, and commerce. They were agents of peace and harmony whose influence stretched beyond Igboland. The Nri people's influence in neighboring lands was especially in Southern Igalaland and Benin kingdom in the 12th to 15th centuries. As great travelers, they were also business people involved in the long distant Tran Saharan trade. The development and sophistication of this civilization is evident in the bronze castings found in Igbo Ukwu, an area of Nri influence. The Benin kingdom became a threat in the 15th century under Oba Ewuare. Since they were against slaves and slavery, their power took a downturn when the slave trade was at its peak in the 18nth century. The Benin and Igala slave raiding empires became the main influence in their relationship with Western and Northern Igbos their former main areas of influence and operation. Upper Northwest Cross River Igbo groups like the Aro Confederacy and Ohafia peoples, as well as the Awka and Umunoha people used oracular activities and other trading opportunities after Nri's decline in the 18th century to become the major influences in Igboland and all adjacent areas. This includes parts of Igalaland and places west of the Niger river indirectly affected by the Benin kingdom.

YORUBA KINGDOM

Historically the Yoruba have been the dominant group on the west bank of the Niger. Of mixed origin, they were the product of periodic waves of migrants. The Yoruba were organized in patrilineal groups that occupied village communities and subsisted on agriculture. From about the 8th century adjacent village compounds, called ile, coalesced into numerous territorial city-states in which clan loyalties became subordinate to dynastic chieftains. The earliest known of these city states formed at Ife and Ijebu. The latter city was fortified by a wall and ditch known today as Sungbo's Eredo around 800 AD. Urbanization was accompanied by high levels of artistic achievement, particularly in terracotta and ivory sculpture and in the sophisticated metal casting produced at Ife. The Yoruba placated a luxuriant pantheon headed by an impersonal deity, Olorun, and included lesser deities who performed various tasks. Oduduwa was regarded as the creator of the earth and the ancestor of the Yoruba kings. According to myth Oduduwa founded Ife and dispatched his sons to establish other cities, where they reigned as priest-kings. Ife was the center of as many as 400 religious cults whose traditions were manipulated to political advantage by the oni (king).

THE NORTHERN KINGDOMS OF THE SAVANA
Trade was the key to the emergence of organized communities in the savanna portions of Nigeria. Prehistoric inhabitants adjusting to the encroaching desert were widely scattered by the third millennium BC, when the desiccation of the Sahara began. Trans-Saharan trade routes linked the western Sudan with the Mediterranean since the time of Carthage and with the Upper Nile from a much earlier date, establishing avenues of communication and cultural influence that remained open until the end of the 19th century. By these same routes, Islam made its way south into West Africa after the 9th century AD.

By then a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states, stretched across the western and central Sudan. The most powerful of these states were Ghana, Gao, and Kanem, which were not within the boundaries of modern Nigeria but indirectly influenced the history of the Nigerian savanna. Ghana declined in the 11th century but was succeeded by Mali Empire which consolidated much of the western Sudan in the 13th century. Following the breakup of Mali a local leader named Sonni Ali (1464-1492) founded the Songhai Empire in the region of middle Niger and the western Sudan and took control of the trans-Saharan trade. Sunni Ali seized Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473, building his regime on trade revenues and the cooperation of Muslim merchants. His successor Askiya Mohammad Ture (1493-1528) made Islam the official religion, built mosques, and brought Muslim scholars, including al-Maghili (died c. 1505), the founder of an important tradition of Sudanic African Muslim scholarship, to Gao. Although these western empires had little political influence on the Nigerian savanna before 1500, they had a strong cultural and economic impact that became more pronounced in the 16th century, especially because these states became associated with the spread of Islam and trade. Throughout the 16th century much of northern Nigeria paid homage to Songhai in the west or to Bornu, a rival empire in the east.

KANEM BORNU EMPIRE

Bornu's history is closely associated with Kanem, which had achieved imperial status in the Lake Chad basin by the 13th century. Kanem expanded westward to include the area that became Bornu. The mai (king) of Kanem and his court accepted Islam in the 11th century, as the western empires also had done. Islam was used to reinforce the political and social structures of the state although many established customs were maintained. Women, for example, continued to exercise considerable political influence.

The mai employed his mounted bodyguard and an inchoate army of nobles to extend Kanem's authority into Bornu. By tradition the territory was conferred on the heir to the throne to govern during his apprenticeship. In the 14th century, however, dynastic conflict forced the then-ruling group and its followers to relocate in Bornu, where as a result the Kanuri emerged as an ethnic group in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The civil war that disrupted Kanem in the second half of the 14th century resulted in the independence of Bornu.

Bornu's prosperity depended on the trans-Sudanic slave trade and the desert trade in salt and livestock. The need to protect its commercial interests compelled Bornu to intervene in Kanem, which continued to be a theater of war throughout the fifteenth and into the sixteenth centuries. Despite its relative political weakness in this period, Bornu's court and mosques under the patronage of a line of scholarly kings earned fame as centers of Islamic culture and learning.

THE HAUSA STATES.

By the 11th century some Hausa states - such as Kano, Katsina, and Gobir - had developed into walled towns engaging in trade, servicing caravans, and the manufacture of various goods. Until the 15th century these small states were on the periphery of the major Sudanic empires of the era. They were constantly pressured by Songhai to the west and Kanem-Bornu to the east, to which they paid tribute. Armed conflict was usually motivated by economic concerns, as coalitions of Hausa states mounted wars against the Jukun and Nupe in the middle belt to collect slaves or against one another for control of trade.

Islam arrived to Hausaland along the caravan routes. The famous Kano Chronicle records the conversion of Kano's ruling dynasty by clerics from Mali, demonstrating that the imperial influence of Mali extended far to the east. Acceptance of Islam was gradual and was often nominal in the countryside where folk religion continued to exert a strong influence. Nonetheless, Kano and Katsina, with their famous mosques and schools, came to participate fully in the cultural and intellectual life of the Islamic world. The Fulani began to enter the Hausa country in the 13th century and by the 15th century they were tending cattle, sheep, and goats in Bornu as well. The Fulani came from the Senegal River valley, where their ancestors had developed a method of livestock management based on transhumance. Gradually they moved eastward, first into the centers of the Mali and Songhai empires and eventually into Hausaland and Bornu. Some Fulbe converted to Islam as early as the 11th century and settled among the Hausa, from whom they became racially indistinguishable. There they constituted a devoutly religious, educated elite who made themselves indispensable to the Hausa kings as state advisers, Islamic tribunes, and teachers.

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Moremi Ajasoro, Princess of the Yoruba..

(Yoruba: Mọ́remí Àjàsorò) was a figure of high significance in the history of the Yoruba peoples of West Africa. Born a princess, she was a courageous queen whose fame contributed to the victory of the Yoruba people over a neighbouring people.

Moremi was a member by marriage of the royal family of Oduduwa, the Yoruba's fabled founding father.

The Ayaba Moremi lived in the 12th century, hailed from Offa, and was married to Oranmiyan, the heir to the king of Ife and founding father of the Yoruba people, Oduduwa. Ile Ife was a kingdom that was said to have been at war with an adjoining tribe who were known to them as the Forest people. (Ìgbò in the Yoruba language, though the said tribe is believed by scholars to have had no relation to the contemporary Ìgbòs of modern Nigeria). Scores of Ife citizens were being enslaved by these people, and because of this they were generally regarded with disdain by the Yoruba city-states. Although the people of Ile-Ife were furious about these raids, they did not have the means to defend themselves. This is because the invaders were seen as spirits by the people of Ife, appearing as masquerades completely covered in raffia leaves.

Moremi was a very brave and beautiful woman who, in order to deal with the problem facing her people, pledged a great sacrifice to the Spirit of the river Esimirin so that she could discover the strength of her nation's enemies.

She is said to have been taken as a slave by the Igbo and, due to her beauty and Esimirin's help, married their ruler as his anointed queen. After familiarizing herself with the secrets of her new husband's army, she escaped to Ile-Ife and revealed this to the Yorubas, who were then able to subsequently defeat them in battle.

Following the war, she returned to her first husband, King Oramiyan of Ife (and later Oyo), who immediately had her re-instated as his queen. Moremi returned to the Esimirin River to fulfill her pledge. The river demanded she sacrificed her only son, Oluorogbo. The demand was inconceivable and Moremi pleaded with the god for a less terrible offering. But in the end, she kept her promise and paid the price. The offering of Oluorogbo to the river god grieved not only Moremi but the whole kingdom of Ife. The Yoruba people consoled Moremi by offering to be her eternal children a promise kept until today.

The Edi Festival is said to have then been started as a means of celebrating the sacrifice the princess made for the people of Yorubaland. Furthermore, a number of public places are named after her in contemporary Nigeria, such as the female residence halls at the University of Lagos and Obafemi Awolowo University.

In 2017, Oba Ogunwusi, the Ooni of Ile Ife, Osun State, erected a statue of Moremi in his palace. The statue is the tallest in Nigeria, displacing the previous holder of that record (a statue in Owerri, the Imo State capital). It is also the fourth tallest in Africa.

Gossip House

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