Aole Arogangan

Seven years is all it took. Aole inherited an empire that Abiodun had held together and gave a suicidal order in the first of them — Iwere-Ile was the home town of his predecessor's mother, and asking the army to burn it told the army exactly what kind of king it now had. Afonja refused, and the refusal was the end: an Are Ona Kakanfo who has publicly declined an order and kept his command is a second government. The covered calabash is the Oyo formula, the same instrument Gaa had used four times, and it worked on Aole as designed. What the tradition kept is not his reign but his last words, which are quoted in Nigerian political argument to this day.

Domains

• sovereignty
• curse

Relations

• enemy: AfonjaThe Alaafin who gave the order and the field marshal who refused it and then came for him.Reference treatment of the breach between Awole and his Are Ona Kakanfo Afonja over the order against Iwere-Ile and of the calabash sent to Aole afterwards. (secondary)

Sources

• Aole Arogangan is the Alaafin of Oyo from 1789 to 1796 whose order against Iwere-Ile broke his relations with the Are Ona Kakanfo Afonja, and who took his own life in 1796 after the army marched on the capital and sent him the empty calabash, pronouncing a curse on the Oyo Mesi as he died.: Reference treatments of Awole Arogangan's reign, the Iwere-Ile order, Afonja's march and the curse at his death. (secondary)