Abeokuta

 ( Populated Places In Ogun State ) 

Abeokuta lies below the Olumo Rock, home to several caves and shrines. The city depends on the Oyan River Dam for its water supply, which is not always dependable. The dam is situated in the Abeokuta North local government area of Ogun State in the West of Nigeria, about 20 km northwest of the state capital Abeokuta. The dam crosses the Oyan River, a tributary of the Ogun River.

Abeokuta is the headquarters of the Ogun-Oshun River Basin Development Authority, which is responsible for development of land and water resources for Lagos State, Ogun State, and Oyo State states. Included in its development programme are irrigation, food-processing, and electrification.

Local industries include but are not limited to fruit canning plants, plastics, breweries, sawmills, and an aluminum products factory. South of town are the Aro granite quarries.

Roads connect it to Lagos as well as Ibadan, Ilaro, Shagamu, Iseyin, Sango-Ota, and Ketou.

Abeokuta was founded as a replacement for Orile Egba in around 1830 by the Egbas after the collapse of the Oyo empire during the civil war. The city was founded because of its strong defensive physical position by refugees trying to protect themselves against slave raiders from Dahomey, who were trying to benefit from the war. Blair, J.H. (1937), Intelligence Report on Abeokuta.

The Owu-focused account states that in 1817, the Oyo Empire dissolved into civil war. Refugees displaced by the collapse of Oyo joined with the Ijebu Kingdom in their war against the Owu Kingdom in southern Yorubaland, which had broken out around the same time. Following the fall of Owu in around 1822, the leading Ana people and Ijebu Kingdom generals returned to their respective homes, but the rest of the armies that had allied with the Oyo refugees were invited by the Ijebus to Ipara, which they made their headquarters for further attacks against several towns in the region. This group then turned their attention to waging war with the Egba people, a loose confederacy of towns that had been established by Yoruba people migrants in the 13th century and were spread throughout the forested land between Ipara and Ibadan. The group conquered and destroyed many of these towns, eventually settling in one of the villages that had not been completely destroyed, Ibadan, which they used as their headquarters for additional conquests. At least a handful of Egba people groups had by this point joined the group of marauders, and they too were living at Ibadan. Conflict between the various groups arose, and in one incident, an Egba chief named Lamodi shot an Ana people chief named Ege to death with a pistol at a public meeting before himself being killed in the ensuing commotion. Fearing Ana people reprisal, most of the Egba population withdrew as a group to an encampment about 3 or 4 miles distant on the other side of the Ona River. Here they enlisted Sodeke to be their leader and migrated to a hilly area known as Olumo Rock, where they established the town of Abeokuta around 1830 at what was then a small farming village.

Nevertheless, all accounts agree that in the 19th century, the Olumo Rock became a place of refuge for displaced Yoruba people during the Yoruba Revolutionary Wars, and from the Dahomey slave hunters. Blair, J.H. (1937), Intelligence Report on Abeokuta. People were scattered throughout the landscape, taking shelter among the rocks surrounding the settlement. The Egba who established Abeokuta were soon joined by other Egba refugees and a substantial number of Owu who had escaped their captors. It became a busy metropolis and home to the majority of the Egba. However, the various groups of Egba did not fuse into a single community; rather, Abeokuta functioned more as a "federation of communities within a town wall than a community in its own right".

Because Abeokuta was in a key location for the palm oil trade and because it was the so-called capital of the Egbas, Dahomey soon became hostile. In the 1851 Battle of Abeokuta, the Egba defeated King Gezo and the Dahomey incursion. They again beat back the Dahomey military in 1864.Canby, Courtlandt. The Encyclopedia of Historic Places. (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), p. 2.

The 1860s also saw problems arise with the Europeans, namely the British in Lagos, which led to the Egba first closing trade routes, followed by the expulsion of missionaries and traders in 1867. Between 1877 and 1893 the Yoruba Civil Wars occurred, and Abeokuta opposed Ibadan, which led the king or alake of the Egba to sign an alliance with the British governor, Sir Gilbert Carter. This occurred in 1893, which formalized the Egba United Government based in Abẹokuta which became recognized by the United Kingdom. In 1914, the Egba lands were incorporated into the colony of Nigeria by the British, with Abeokuta as the provincial capital.

In 1918, an uprising took place, the Adubi War, which was related to the levying of taxes and the policy of indirect rule by Sir Frederick Lugard, the British Governor-General. This was the only internal threat to British control of Nigeria during the course of the First World War.

The Abeokuta Women's Revolt, led by the Abeokuta Women's Union (AWU), took place in the 1940s. It was a resistance movement against the imposition of unfair taxation by the Nigerian colonial government.

In 1976, Abeokuta became the capital of the newly created Ogun State.