Legend · Undated oral tradition
Image: Owu Falls, Kwara State, Nigeria - 6.jpg — Godwin Oluyomi, CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
At a waterfall in Kwara, two snake stories offer different answers to a question about who once occupied the water.
At Owu Falls, in the Igbomina hills of Kwara State, water drops off a high rocky cliff into a cold, dark pool. People say someone lived there first.
In one story, a man named Bamigboye Aremu came to the falls long ago, in the 1700s, and found a giant python in the water. Instead of fighting, they talked. The snake agreed to leave the place to people. But it made a promise. It would leave a reminder that it had been there.
The reminder is the rainbow. On a sunny day you can see it hanging in the spray.
Another version is darker. Here, a huge snake and dangerous birds terrorised the villages around the falls. The people could do nothing. Then the heavens took over: a thunderbolt struck the snake dead, and the birds were driven away. This version says it happened after 1940.
The two endings could not be more different. In one, the snake chooses to leave and is remembered with a rainbow. In the other, it is destroyed. They are not one history, but two legends about the same water.
The falls themselves are real enough. They lie near Owa Kajola in Ifelodun, though the easiest way in is often through neighbouring Isin. The path is rocky. The road is worse.
That is why few Nigerians have heard of Owu. A study in 2021 blamed the bad roads, and found basic facilities missing and the surrounding forest and wildlife under pressure.
For the villagers nearby, the falls are just part of life. A better road would mean more to them than any brochure. And until it comes, Owu stays what the stories make it: a wild place where people arrived second. Watch the spray for the rainbow when you get there.
