Second in size only to the Great Wall of China, Sungbo’s Eredo in Ijebu-Ode is a staggeringly impressive hand-built system of defence walls dating back to around the year 1,000 and located just an hour’s drive from Lagos. The archaeology of Sungbo’s Eredo points to the presence of a large polity in the area before the opening of the Trans-Atlantic trade.
The Ijebu are a subgroup of the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria. In precolonial times they established a single kingdom under the Awujale (the titular head) whose seat of government was the town of Ijebu-Ode. The Ijebu People inhabit the South-Central part of Yorubaland – a territory that is bounded in the North by Ibadan, in the East by Ondo, Okitipupa and the West by Egbaland. The Southern fringe is open to the sea with the coastlines of Epe, Ejinrin and Ikorodu. Despite the political division which has these three towns in Lagos while the main part of Ijebuland is Ogun State, the people have always regarded themselves as one entity even when the immigration legends which have often been cited point in different directions. Structurally, the kingdom was composed of geographical divisions, each of which was identified by a name. Some of them were characterized by close socioeconomic and political ties effected through the joint control of a political association, the Pampa society, which coordinated commercial, communal, and military activities in the area.
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What is Sungbo’s Eredo to Ijebu kingdom?
The earliest documented reference to the Ijebu Kingdom is a Portuguese source of late-fifteenth-century context. The age of the kingdom, however, is difficult to determine since the Ijebu, like most African societies, were pre-literate. By 1485, the Portuguese had explored parts of Ijebu land and established contact with the kingdom. Earlier studies carried out on Sungbo’s Eredo (embankment) showed that it is about 165 km in circumference and surrounds the whole of Ijebu Kingdom. In the 1508 writings of Duarte Pacheco Pereira, he seemed to have written about the Eredo ramparts when he wrote that; “Twelve or thirteen leagues above by this river (Rio de Lago) is a great city called ‘Geebu’ surrounded by a great ditch, and the ruler of this land in our days is called Agusale.”The total length of the fortifications is more than 160 kilometres. The impressive size and complex construction of the Eredo drew worldwide media attention in September 1999 when Dr Patrick Darling surveyed the site and began publicizing his bid to preserve the Eredo and bring the site more prominence. Parts of the site can be accessed either from Epe or Ijebu Ode. The ramparts marked out what is believed to be the boundary of the original Ijebu Kingdom ruled by the Awujale. Civil wars and the arrival of the British eventually broke the kingdom’s centuries-old Lagos lagoon trade monopoly. Darling described the Eredo site as a breathtaking find, with many of its remains relatively intact, although overgrown by the rain forest.
Gérard L. F. Chouin, a Margaret Hamilton Associate Professor of African History, William & Mary and Co-director of the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project Williamsburg, said, ” We dated the site from the last decades of the 14th c. to the first decades of the 15th c. On the basis of 12 radiocarbon dates obtained at Ilara.” The wall and ditches were built long before the mechanical era and therefore required a copious and well-coordinated amount of labour. The Eredo was strategically designed. It created a formidable barrier and would have rendered any attacks useless. The Eredo was made from rammed earth, and the construction method involved the digging and piling of the dug earth into banks to form the walls. The type of earth used during the construction is known as laterite, which is a reddish soil that is rich in aluminium and oxides that hardens when exposed to air. Given the method of construction of the wall, advanced knowledge of soil mechanics and hydrology must have been required.
Sungbo's Eredo follow-up. When the eredo comes out with a very strong topographic signature. This section of the eredo passes through a palm oil plantation. pic.twitter.com/EEQQ0dIfz6
— Gérard L. F. Chouin (@glchouin) June 11, 2024
A small portion of Sungbo's Eredo and river bed going through. pic.twitter.com/Rfg1bV1Yq6
— Gérard L. F. Chouin (@glchouin) June 4, 2024
The Eredo served a defensive purpose when it was built in 800–1000 AD, a period of political confrontation and consolidation in the southern Nigerian rainforest. It was likely to have been inspired by the same process that led to the construction of similar walls and ditches throughout western Nigeria, including earthworks around Ifẹ̀, Ilesa, and the Benin Iya, a 6,500-kilometre (4,000 mi) series of connected but separate earthworks in the neighboring Edo-speaking region. It is believed that the Eredo was a means of unifying an area of diverse communities into a single kingdom. It seems that the builders of these fortifications deliberately tried to reach groundwater or clay to create a swampy bottom for the ditch. If this could be achieved in shallow depth, builders stopped, even if only at the depth of 1 meter. In some places small, conical idol statues had been placed on the bottom of the ditch. Vertical sided ditches of hardened laterite (natural soil mixture of clay and iron-oxides) show how the ditch profiles were originally dug. Together with the bank of spoil heaped up on the inner side, the combined height can be as much as 20 metres. Trees above this gigantic ditch help protect its sides from the forces of nature. Where these trees have fallen or been cut down, partial collapse has been the result.
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