Legend · c. 1510 to present
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Ondo people say their kingdom began with twin girls a king did not want. Marked on each cheek and pushed out of the palace, one of them, Pupupu, ended her road at a lone warrior's hut and became the first Osemawe.
Ondo people have a dialect that other Yoruba speakers often struggle to follow, and a facial mark of their own: a single stroke on each cheek. Both, in a sense, point back to the same story, the story of how their kingdom began.
There is more than one version, and Ondo people know it. The most widely celebrated one makes the founder a wife of Oduduwa, the father of the Yoruba in Ile-Ife. The historian Samuel Johnson told a similar tale but made her the wife of Ajaka, Oduduwa's grandson. Another version, which an Ondo man named Victor Olukayode told The Sun newspaper in 2017, places the beginning in the palace of the Alafin of Oyo. What all of them agree on is that it began with twins, and that twins were not welcome.
In Olukayode's telling, one of the Alafin's wives gave birth to twin girls while the king was away. When he came back he ordered the twins and their mother out of the palace and out of Oyo. He also gave a cruel order: that one stroke be cut on each cheek of the babies. He believed the mark would bring them suffering on the road. Instead, the story goes, the single stroke became the mark of a whole people, and Ondo still wears it today.
The mother and her daughters did not go alone. The Alafin's war leader, a man called Ija, went with them, first to a place called Epin, in what the story calls the Fulani country. After the Alafin, Oba Oluaso, died, they came back to Oyo, hoping for a softer welcome. The new Alafin sent them away too, again with a war leader, this time in the direction of Ile-Ife.
That second exile is where the real journey starts. The girls had been rejected by two kings. Now they had to find a home that nobody could send them away from.
They travelled on through a place called Ita Ijama and came to Epe, a small town that today sits about seven miles from Ondo on the Oke-Igbo road. There the ruler, the Iyanghede of Epe, welcomed them with real warmth and treated them as royalty. Before they left, an Ifa oracle gave them an instruction: carry a yam stake, and settle where it can be planted.
Epe never lost its place in the story. Ondo people still call it their first home, the town they came from before the one they live in now. Many Ondo festivals and rituals are traced to Epe, and pilgrims sometimes go there for them. By old custom, when an Osemawe died, his head was buried in Epe while the rest of his body was buried in Ondo.
From Epe the group moved on and stopped at a place now called Ile-Oluji. There, the story says, the Alafin's wife lay down and slept for days without waking. The Wikipedia account of the kingdom records more plainly that the mother, Queen Olu, died at Ile-Oluji. Either way, the twins went on without her.
Their walk ended at the foot of a hill that Ondo people still call Oke Agunla. From the top they saw smoke rising from below, and they followed it down. At the bottom they found a man living alone in a hut. He said his name was Ekiri. He was no farmer and no hunter, but a warrior from Benin who had got lost and could not find his way home, so he had simply stayed, with no wife and no children. He gave up his hut to the royal princess as a sign of respect.
Ekiri then led them to a piece of ground that is still called Oridi. There they tried the yam stake, as the oracle in Epe had told them to, and it went in. The tradition says they were overjoyed. The princess, remembered as Pupupu, became the first Osemawe, the ruler of Ondo.
The kingdom dates its founding to around 1510, and in 2010 it celebrated 500 years. But Pupupu's reign did not end quietly. A coup removed her, and her son, named Aiho in some versions and Airo in others, was made ruler. He built the palace and set up the basic structure of the kingdom around his royal line. That line grew into four houses, each started by one of his sons, though one house later died out for lack of male heirs. The Osemawe is chosen from these houses.
Old Ondo had some unusual habits. Leadership rotated among the royal houses. Women, by some accounts, had their own council that advised the men's council, though not every scholar accepts this. All land belonged to the king, but any man could farm it if he got permission from the head of the nearest community.
The nineteenth century broke much of that. The slave trade and the wars across Yorubaland turned power toward whoever held the most slaves. From 1845 to 1872 Ondo lived through quick changes of ruler, wars with its neighbours, real violence, and three moves of its capital. Between 1865 and 1885 people fled to a place called Oke Opa, and three Osemawes were installed and died there. In 1872 the Lagos administrator John Hawley Glover helped make peace between Ondo and Ife, partly to open a trade road to Lagos. Missionaries came in 1875. On 20 February 1889 the Osemawe signed a free-trade agreement with the Lagos Colony, and in 1899 Ondo came under the British protectorate.
The crown survived all of it. On 29 December 2008 Oba Victor Adesimbo Kiladejo was crowned the 44th Osemawe, a descendant, by the kingdom's own reckoning, of the twin girl a king once marked and sent away.
