Ogun State, Nigeria — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Ogun State known for?

It carries the name of the Ogun River and the ancient kingdoms strung along it. Abeokuta, the capital, grew up around the granite dome of Olumo Rock, where Egba refugees sheltered in the early 19th century and where indigo-dyed adire cloth is still worked by hand. Ijebu-Ode carries the older Ijebu Kingdom and its glittering Ojude Oba festival, while Sagamu holds the Remo towns and Nigeria's busiest kola-nut trade.

Where is Ogun State?

Ogun State sits in the south-western corner of Nigeria, inland from the Atlantic and wrapped around the Ogun River that gives it its name. The river rises up in Oyo State to the north and runs the length of Ogun before spilling into the Lagos Lagoon at the coast. Four neighbours press in on its edges.

Oyo State lies to the north, Ondo State to the east, Lagos State to the south, and the international boundary with the Republic of Benin closes off the west. That western frontier makes Ogun the only Yoruba state touching another country. Rainforest covers most of the ground.

It gives way to wooded savanna in the north-west, drier and more open than the green belt further south. Abeokuta, the capital, stands on the banks of the Ogun River in the north-central part of the state, gathered around the grey granite of Olumo Rock where the Egba first walled themselves in. Ijebu-Ode and Sagamu lie east and south of it, on the low ground toward Lagos.

The land never rises far. It is a country of river valleys, dye-pits and forest rather than mountains, and the water has shaped it more than any ridge ever could.

What is Ogun State like?

Ogun is thoroughly Yoruba, and its culture divides along the old kingdoms rather than any modern map. The Egba hold Abeokuta, the Ijebu hold Ijebu-Ode, the Remo hold Sagamu, and the Yewa, Awori and Egbado peoples fill in the west. Each keeps its own crown and its own court.

That is the texture of the place. In Abeokuta the craft is adire: indigo-resist cloth dyed in sunken pits and worked by women's guilds for generations. The city grew beneath Olumo Rock, and the rock is still climbed as much for the shrines in its clefts as for the view over the tin roofs below.

The grandest single event belongs to Ijebu-Ode. Ojude Oba draws its crowds two days after the Muslim Ileya feast, when the age-grade societies, the regberegbe, parade before the Awujale of Ijebuland in embroidered robes and mounted horsemen wheel across his forecourt. Music, praise-poetry and Yoruba dress run through all of it.

Talking drums answer the singers. Kingship and ceremony weigh as heavily here as the everyday market and farm.

What is the history of Ogun State?

The kingdoms here are far older than the state. Some go back centuries. Ijebu-Ode was already the chief town of the Ijebu by the 16th century, a walled trading power between the forest and the coast.

Abeokuta came later: around 1830 the hunter-leader Sodeke gathered Egba refugees from the collapsing Oyo Empire beneath Olumo Rock, and its name, meaning "under the rock", records that flight. The modern state is a creation of 1976, cut from the old Western State and named for the Ogun River that ties its towns together.

What is the climate of Ogun State?

Ogun's year falls into two distinct seasons. A long wet season runs from April to October, and a drier stretch holds from November to March, when the dusty harmattan wind can drift down from the north. Rain is heavy: Abeokuta takes on the order of 1,400 millimetres a year, most of it falling in the June peak that swells the Ogun River.

Warm and humid throughout, the south stays greener under rainforest while the wooded savanna of the north-west dries out harder between the rains.

How do you get to Ogun State?

Most travellers arrive through Lagos. Murtala Muhammed International Airport in neighbouring Lagos State is the usual gateway, an hour or so south of Abeokuta by road. From there the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway runs straight through the state, threading Sagamu and Ijebu-Ode, and the Lagos-Ibadan standard-gauge railway now follows the same corridor with stops on Ogun soil.

Ogun bills itself as the only Nigerian state reachable by every mode of transport, whether you come by road or rail, by water or by air.