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Nigeria The Yoruba Wars
Oyo, the great exporter of slaves in the eighteenth
century,
collapsed in a civil war after 1817, and by the middle of
the
1830s the whole of Yorubaland was swept up in these civil
wars.
New centers of power--Ibadan, Abeokuta, Owo, and
Warri--contested
control of the trade routes and sought access to fresh
supplies
of slaves, which were important to repopulate the
turbulent
countryside. At this time, the British withdrew from the
slave
trade and began to blockade the coast
(see Abolition of the Slave Trade
, this ch.). The blockade required some adjustments
in the
slave trade along the lagoons that stretched outward from
Lagos,
while the domestic market for slaves to be used as farm
laborers
and as porters to carry commodities to market easily
absorbed the
many captives that were a product of these wars.
War and slave raiding were complementary exercises
among the
Yoruba, who needed capital to buy the firearms with which
they
fought in a vicious cycle of war and enslavement. Military
leaders were well aware of the connection between guns and
enslavement.
Some of the emerging Yoruba states started as war camps
during the period of chaos in which Oyo broke up and the
Muslim
revolutionaries who were allied to the caliphate conquered
northern Yorubaland. Ibadan, which became the largest city
in
black Africa during the nineteenth century, owed its
growth to
the role it played in the Oyo civil wars. Ibadan's
omuogun
(war boys) raided far afield for slaves and held off the
advance
of the Fulani. They also took advantage of Benin's
isolation to
seize the roads leading to the flourishing slave port at
Lagos.
The threat that Ibadan would dominate Yorubaland alarmed
its
rivals and inspired a military alliance led by the Egba
city of
Abeokuta. Dahomey, to the west, further contributed to the
insecurity by raiding deep into Yorubaland, the direction
of
raids depending upon its current alliances.
Data as of June 1991
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