Moremi Ajasoro

Moremi's story is an intelligence operation with a price attached. She does not fight the Ugbo; she arranges to be taken by them, lives among them long enough to find out what they are — the accounts turn on their costumes, which is what made them terrifying and what made them beatable — and comes home with it. What the story is actually about is the second half: she owes the river, the river names her son, and she pays. Ife's answer, that the whole town would be her children instead, is the closing line and the reason the Edi festival exists. Her husband was already in this registry.

Children

• Oluorogbo

Domains

• queenship
• self sacrifice
• deliverance

Relations

• consort of: OranmiyanThe registry carried Oranmiyan and not her, which in the Ife material is the wrong figure to have kept: he founds cities, she is the reason there is an Ife left to found them from.Reference treatment of Moremi Ajasoro as the wife of Oranmiyan. (secondary)
• mother of: OluorogboHer only son, and the price of the bargain.Reference treatment of Oluorogbo as Moremi's only son, given to the Esimirin river in payment of her vow. (secondary)

Sources

• Moremi Ajasoro is a twelfth-century queen of Ile-Ife, wife of Oranmiyan, who had herself captured by the Ugbo raiders in order to learn their secret, freed Ife from them, and paid her vow to the Esimirin river with her only son Oluorogbo; the Edi festival at Ile-Ife commemorates her.: Reference treatments of Moremi Ajasoro, of the Esimirin vow, of the sacrifice of Oluorogbo and of the Edi festival. (secondary)