Efunroye Tinubu

Biography

She was born Efunporoye Osuntinubu, around 1805 or 1810, in the Ojokodo forest country of Egbaland, in what is now Ogun State. Her grandmother Osunsola was an Owu trader who took boats down to Badagry carrying bark, roots, herbs and skins, and that is where the apprenticeship started. Her mother sold food.

Her first husband died young and left her a widow with two small sons. In about 1833 she married Adele Ajosun, who had been Oba of Lagos and been thrown out, and was sitting in exile at Badagry. Two years later Adele went back to the throne and she walked into Lagos beside him.

She never really left the centre of power again. Adele died in 1837. She backed his son Oluwole. Oluwole was killed in a gunpowder explosion in 1841 and she backed Akitoye against Kosoko. When Kosoko drove Akitoye out in 1845 she went into exile with him, and when the Royal Navy shelled Lagos in December 1851 and put Akitoye back, she came back too, and collected her reward: trading concessions and grants of land, including the ground where Tinubu Square now sits.

Her two sons died young. She appears to have left no descendants at all.

What she traded

Everything. Tobacco, salt, cotton, palm oil, coconut oil, pepper, cloth, and firearms and gunpowder in quantity. By 1850 she was the most important middleman between European merchants on the coast and the Yoruba interior, with an armed household and a private retinue.

She also traded in people, and she went on doing it after the treaty of January 1852 made it illegal, moving captives to Brazilian and Portuguese buyers in exchange for guns. This is not a colonial slander. It is in the standard biography of her, Oladipo Yemitan's, which concludes she continued in the trade until she died. When she was once accused of selling a boy, the answer attributed to her was that she had a large household and had to feed them, and needed the money to do it.

There is a popular version of her in Nigeria now as a repentant slave trader who turned against the traffic. It is not supported by the sources. An archive that tells you only the heroic half of her is not telling you about her.

Historical Context

Lagos in her lifetime was the hinge of the Bight of Benin. Britain had abolished its own slave trade in 1807 and spent the next fifty years trying to shut everyone else's, with a naval squadron, treaties and consuls, while simultaneously building a commercial position on the same coast. The bombardment that restored her ally Akitoye in 1851 was sold as anti-slavery and functioned as regime change. Ten years later Britain annexed Lagos outright.

Into that a Yoruba woman had built a commercial empire that stood between British merchants and the interior. She was an obstacle to two British projects at once, the suppression of the trade and the opening of the market, and she was not going to move.

The banishment

Consul Benjamin Campbell came back to Lagos in 1856, went to Oba Dosunmu, and had her thrown out of the city. In May 1856 she was banished to Abeokuta.

The reasons given were a bundle. She was still trading slaves for guns. She held a grip on Lagos commerce that Campbell wanted broken. She had led agitation in 1855 against the Saro and Amaro returnees, the Sierra Leonean and Brazilian traders whose arrival was reshaping the city, and the formal charge was that she used her wealth and power against the Oba and subverted the customs of Lagos. There was also an allegation, never proved, that she had plotted against Campbell's life.

She is often called the first Nigerian woman to resist British rule. What is true is that a British official removed her because she would not be governed. What that resistance was in defence of is the uncomfortable part.

What She Fought For

Her own commercial and political independence, pursued with total consistency for fifty years and without much concern for who paid for it. Her career is a straight answer to a question people often ask abstractly, which is whether power in a woman's hands looks different. Hers did not. It looked like power.

Major Achievements

She held effective kingmaking influence across four reigns in Lagos: Adele, Oluwole, Akitoye and Dosunmu.

Exiled and starting again at nearly fifty, she rebuilt in Abeokuta as an arms merchant, and when Dahomey came against the city under King Glele in March 1864 with thousands of troops including the women's corps, she is credited with supplying the Egba army with powder, bullets and provisions. The Egba threw Dahomey back.

That same year the Egba made her Iyalode, the senior woman of the realm, a title that carried a seat on the ruling council and authority over markets and trade. She was the first Iyalode of Egbaland. It was not a courtesy; in Yoruba practice the office went to a woman who had already accumulated the power it recognised.

Her Impact Today

Tinubu Square on Lagos Island carries her name, and has carried it longer than the interruption suggests: it was Ita Tinubu first, was renamed Independence Square after 1960, and then the old name came back. Her statue stands there on a cenotaph, dedicated during Bola Tinubu's time as governor of Lagos State. The square is being rebuilt again as a public park.

On the question people always ask: she is not known to be related to Bola Ahmed Tinubu, president of Nigeria since 2023. Tinubu was not a family surname of hers. It is the tail of her own birth name, Osuntinubu, a name given to a devotee of Osun, and in nineteenth-century Lagos her household name spread to everyone under her roof, including her husband's children by other wives and the people she held as slaves. That is why the name is common in Lagos. She also seems to have left no surviving descendants. He has never claimed the connection.

She is argued about constantly, which is the healthiest thing that could happen to her memory. When a Nollywood production announced a film about her, the objection came fast and from Nigerians: why make a heroine of a slave trader when Amina and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti are sitting right there. It is a fair question. The answer this archive gives is that she belongs in it precisely because she is not a moral lesson. She was a Yoruba woman who reached the top of a brutal economy on her own terms and never apologised, and Nigeria is still arguing about what to do with her a hundred and forty years later.