Lost history · 1947 to present
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In 1947 a band of Ilaje fishermen and their families walked away from their villages over the killing of twins, and built a town on the sea's edge where nobody had a private income. For a while, visitors called it a wonder.
The Ilaje are Yoruba people of the Ondo coast. For hundreds of years, as one 1951 report put it, they lived on a strip of muddy, open swamp between the beach and the forest, in small villages cut off from one another by creeks, earning their living from fish. It was not country that made it easy for people to work together on a large scale.
In 1929 the Cherubim and Seraphim church reached Ilajeland. Some of its members there grew angry about a practice that local tradition still allowed: the killing of twin babies. One account also mentions the killing of albino children. These members spoke out loudly against it. They also accused their own church leaders in Ilajeland of going along with it, and warned that the church would lose its meaning if it kept quiet.
The traditional rulers did not take this lightly. A history of the community published on Zenodo records that the protesters carried out acts of civil disobedience, and paid for them. Some were fined by the local authority. Others went to jail on charges brought by the traditional institution they were fighting. The punishments did not break them. They began to call themselves the Holy Apostles, and they started looking for somewhere else to live, moving out to empty islands and swamps.
A study in the Yoruba Studies Review adds a prophetic note. A man named Zebulon Eyin Aladetimehin, it says, had begun predicting the founding of a new town and the birth of the Holy Apostle Church about two full years before either happened. He was, in that account, frustrated by the killing of twins and albino children and determined to end the worship of the old local gods.
Then, on 12 January 1947, a group of Ilaje men, women, young people and children were told to leave their communities and go to a place that would be shown to them. They took their fishing nets, their fish traps and their boats with them. The town they built was called Aiyetoro, which the 1951 report translates as "the world is at peace".
What the Holy Apostles built next astonished outsiders. A note in the journal Africa, summing up a 1951 report in the magazine Nigeria, called it a remarkable community built by a small group of African fishermen without help from government, missions or anyone else. In three years it had grown to about 2,000 people.
The idea was simple and bold. Members would try to live by the teaching of the New Testament. Every man and woman would work for the community, and all profits would go into one common purse. Three strong leaders guided the plan, the report says, and a site was chosen right by the sea, because sea fishing was to be the main work. The Yoruba Studies Review names a man called E. O. Peter as the first political and religious leader.
The town was laid out carefully, with room to grow. Because the ground was swamp, they built walkways of planks on stakes, raised three feet above the mud, running at right angles to the shore. Houses were made of planks and roofed with aluminium, placed to catch as much light and air as possible.
Fishing came first, but by 1951 the community also ran a weaving business, a tailoring shop, a carpentry workshop, a dye works, a laundry, a factory making sun helmets, and even had a town gardener. The aim was to make the town as self-supporting as it could be.
Nobody had a private income. Every sale of fish, whether in local markets or for export, went into the common purse. In return the community supplied everything people needed. A committee of 16 elders, both men and women, ran the town, and smaller committees handled food, clothing and the different industries. There was even money saved for things like electric light.
Life had a strict rhythm. Each day began with a church service of about two hours, and only after that did the work of the town start. Visitors noticed how clean and orderly the houses and streets were, and how healthy and happy the people looked. People wore neat, practical clothes, and special uniforms had been designed for fishermen, market women and other groups.
It is worth remembering what all this grew out of. The people who built this tidy, prosperous town had been fined and jailed at home for refusing to accept the deaths of twin babies. They left with their nets and boats, went into the swamps, and made a place where, at least in its early years, everyone worked for everyone.
The Holy Apostles also inspired others. The Yoruba Studies Review describes how, a year later, a prophet named Elisha Ilene Ogunfeyimi led his own followers into a feared swampy forest called Ugbonla, near his home town, and founded another Christian settlement there in February 1948. The study says Ugbonla followed in Aiyetoro's footsteps.
Aiyetoro's story did not stay happy. Its home on the low mud flats by the Atlantic has left it badly exposed to the sea. In recent years AP News reported on what it called Nigeria's "Happy City", meant to be a Christian utopia, now suffering as buildings sink into the ocean, old timber sticking out of the waves and broken foundations lining the shore. The same sea that fed the common purse is now eating the town.
