Oluyole

The choice of title is the whole story. Oluyole could have ruled Ibadan in his own name — he had the army, and Atiba had a town he had built out of a market and a claim — and instead he took Bashorun, which is the Oyo constitution's second office, and thereby placed himself inside a system rather than beside it. That the same office had been used by Gaa to kill four kings two generations earlier is not lost on the Yoruba sources. The arrangement held; there is still an Alaafin, and Ibadan became the largest city in the region under men who called themselves the Alaafin's officers. Oluyole is Abiodun's grandson and Atiba's nephew, which makes the whole nineteenth-century settlement a family arrangement about a ruined empire.

Domains

• military command
• statecraft

Relations

• grandchild of: Abiodun
• subordinate to: Atiba Atobatele

Sources

• Reference treatments of Oluyole's parentage, his offices at Ibadan and his settlement with Alaafin Atiba.