Lost history · 1830s–1872
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
Kosoko fought his way onto the Lagos throne, lost it to British gunboats in 1851, and then built a little kingdom of his own across the lagoon at Epe. The British ended up signing a treaty with him.
The trouble started with a marriage. Kosoko was a Lagos prince, son of Oba Osinlokun, and as a young man he married a woman who had been promised to the Eletu Odibo. That was a dangerous man to offend. The Eletu Odibo was the head of the chiefs who chose and crowned the obas of Lagos. From that day on, he made it his business to keep Kosoko off the throne.
He was very good at it. When Kosoko's brother Idewu Ojulari died in the 1830s, the kingmakers skipped Kosoko and called back his uncle Adele from Badagry. When Adele died in 1837, the Eletu blocked him again and crowned Adele's son Oluwole. Then the feud turned ugly. The Eletu accused Kosoko's sister, Opo Olu, of witchcraft. The diviners cleared her, but Oluwole banished her anyway. Kosoko and his followers rose up in a fight remembered as Ogun Ewe Koko, the war of the cocoyam leaves. They lost and fled east along the lagoon to Epe.
Then the Eletu did something no one in Lagos forgot. He dug up the bones of Kosoko's mother and threw them into the lagoon.
Lagos politics in those years was full of strange turns. In 1841 lightning hit the palace and set off an explosion that killed Oluwole; his body could only be identified by his royal beads. The chiefs might have called Kosoko then, but nobody knew where he was, so they crowned another uncle, Akitoye. Akitoye, trying to make peace, invited his nephew home. Kosoko came back on the ship of a notorious slave trader, José Domingo Martínez, was given the title Oloja of Ereko, and quietly gathered war chiefs and the support of the Muslim community. The two men's town criers traded insults in song. Akitoye's crier sang that he was a pin driven firmly into the ground. Kosoko's crier answered that he was the digger who roots out pins.
In July 1845 Kosoko's side besieged the palace for three weeks in what was called the Salt Water War. Akitoye escaped up the lagoon. And Kosoko took his revenge on the Eletu Odibo, who was captured in the fighting: he had him sealed in an empty oil barrel, set alight, and dumped in the same lagoon where his mother's bones had gone.
Kosoko was now Oba of Lagos. He held it for six years. But the man he had pushed out did not sit still. Akitoye went to Badagry and made friends with the Anglican missionaries and with the British consul John Beecroft, presenting himself as a friend of the anti-slavery cause. Lagos was a major slave port, Kosoko was part of that trade, and the British wanted it closed. Traders also wanted freer business.
In November 1851 a British party came to Kosoko with a proposal: friendship with Britain, and an end to the slave trade. He said no, on the grounds that Lagos was under the Oba of Benin and only Benin could deal with foreign powers about its status. When fighting broke out, his men beat the British back. Beecroft then wrote to the Oba of Benin saying Kosoko had fired on a flag of truce and declared war on England, and that Lagos would be burnt if he did not surrender.
On 26 December 1851 British warships and a flotilla of boats attacked the palace. Kosoko defended it hard for two days. People in Lagos still call that fight Ogun Ahoyaya, or Ogun Agidingbi, after the cannons that boiled from firing. By 28 December it was over. Kosoko and his people slipped away towards Ijebu, and Akitoye was put back on the throne by the British. Days later, on 1 January 1852, Akitoye signed the treaty abolishing the slave trade at Lagos. It was the first step towards the British taking Lagos outright ten years later.
Kosoko did not disappear. He went back to Epe, the town where his chiefs Dada Antonio and Osho Akanbi had taken refuge about fifteen years before. By 1852 he had built a real base there, with around 400 fighters, among them his loyal war captain Oshodi Tapa.
From Epe he kept up the fight. In August 1853 he attacked Lagos twice, on the 5th and the 11th. The second raid came very close to the palace and was only turned back by a burst of fire from a British warship. The British realised that their man in Lagos would never be safe while Kosoko sat across the water. So instead of crushing him, they negotiated. On 28 September 1854 Kosoko signed the Treaty of Epe with Consul Benjamin Campbell. He promised to give up any claim to Lagos and not to threaten its trade. In return, the British recognised his state at Epe. For a man who had just been shelled out of his palace, that was a clever result. He had lost Lagos, but he had a country of his own.
He still wanted to go home. In 1860 he got the Oba of Benin to ask Dosunmu, Akitoye's son and now king, to let him return. Dosunmu refused, pointing out that Lagos was no longer paying tribute to Benin. But after Britain annexed Lagos in 1861 the British let Kosoko back, as Oloja of Ereko again, on a pension of £400 a year. Oshodi Tapa settled in the Lagos quarter of Epetedo.
Back in Lagos, Kosoko's people did well under the new order. His circle, Oshodi Tapa and the trader Taiwo Olowo among them, threw themselves into business with the European firms. By the time Kosoko died in 1872, the colonial government reckoned his faction, at least 20,000 followers, was the stronger one in the city. He was buried at Iga Ereko. His family name is still well known: the Nollywood actor Jide Kosoko and the singer Adekunle Gold are among his descendants, and in 2026 his life came to cinemas as King Kosoko: The Battle for Lagos.
