Lagos Information
Before the creation of the States in 1967, the identity of Lagos was  restricted to the Lagos Island of Eko (Bini word for war camp). The first settlers in Eko were the Aworis, who were mostly hunters and fishermen. They had migrated from Ile-Ife by stages to the coast at Ebute-Metta.
The Aworis were later reinforced by a band of Benin warriors and joined by other Yoruba elements who settled on the mainland for a while till the danger of an attack by the warring tribes plaguing Yorubaland drove them to seek the security of the nearest island, Iddo, from where they spread to Eko.
By 1851 after the abolition of the slave trade, there was a great attraction to Lagos by the repatriates. First were the Saro, mainly freed Yoruba captives and their descendants who, having been set ashore in Sierra Leone, responded to the pull of their homeland, and returned in successive waves to Lagos. Having had the privilege of Western education and christianity, they made remarkable contributions to education and the rapid modernisation of Lagos. They were granted land to settle in the Olowogbowo and Breadfruit areas of the island.
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The Brazilian returnees, the Aguda, also started arriving in Lagos in the mid-19th century and brought with them the skills they had acquired in Brazil. Most of them were master-builders, carpenters and masons, and gave the distinct charaterisitics of Brazilian architecture to their residential buildings at Bamgbose and Campos Square areas which form a large proportion of architectural richness of the city.
The other two groups of Lagos State citizens are the Ogu people of Badagry and its environs, and the Ijebu in Ikorodu and Epe Local Governments.
Badagry town houses the first storey building in Nigeria, built in 1845 and still standing on its original site.
Badagry's original name was Gbagle a contraction of the word Ogbaglee, meaning in Ogu (not Egun as commonly mis-pronounced and mis-spelt) "a farmland near the swamp". The Ogu people are historically reputed to have migrated from the ancient Ketu.
Kingdom (part of Oduduwa's Kingdom) and they left Ile-Ife around the mid-13th century, for Accra in Gold Coast. The Ga/Ewe (Aja-Ogu) speaking group of today's Ghana are indeed the kith and kin of the Ogu of Badagry. The history of Badagry has a fascinating tradition of Kingship (Wheno-Aholu) and local administration. The ancient town of Badagry is divided into eight quarters namely: Jegba, Ahoriko Awhanjigoh, Boekoh, Wharakoh, Pesuka and Ganho and its adjoining villages on both the mainland and island, have for centuries recognised the Wheno Aholu Akran of Badagry, of which there have been seventeen from the earliest times to the present Akran, Menu Toyi I crowned in 1977.
The Ijebu people of the Epe and Ikorodu Local Government areas share a collective heritage with their kith and kin in the present day Ogun State, but have also developed strong trade and cultural links with the entire riverine coastline of Nigeria, with its interlaced pattern of waters and creeks which empty into the lagoon and the Atlantic ocean. By the turn of this century, through administrative sleight of hand by the British, all the major towns and settlements of the two areas had been annexed as part of the "colony" and the amalgamation in 1914 finally merged Ikorodu with the protectorate.
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Destination Info
