Idanre Hills

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From the forested floor of the southwestern Yoruba country, in what is now Ondo State, the land rises without warning into a company of grey domes. They are granite, swept clean of soil, rounded by an age of rain into smooth and almost sheer-sided towers that stand a thousand feet above the plain and hold between them deep valleys and a high tableland. A geologist reads them as inselbergs — island-mountains — worn from a batholith of igneous rock laid down some five hundred million years ago and then exposed, grain by grain, as the softer country around it wore away. The people who climbed into them read them otherwise: as a stronghold given to the founders, a place set apart, the high seat of a town that lived among the rocks for the better part of a thousand years. The hills are called Oke Idanre, the heights of Idanre, and on them once stood a whole community — its ruler’s palace, its court of elders, its shrines and its burial-grounds — reached by a single long stair and left, within living memory, to stand empty as a monument.

The climb and the founding

The tradition of Idanre traces its line, as so much of Yoruba tradition does, back to Ilé-Ifẹ̀, the cradle-city where the world was made and from which the crowned lineages of the Yoruba are held to descend. The founder remembered in the oral history is Olofin, by his birth-name Aremitan, named in the lineage as a younger brother of Odùduwà — the figure from whom the royal houses of Ife claim their origin. From Ife the company moved south and east, in the long centuries of dispersal that carried Yoruba town-founders out across the forest to set their crowns in new ground. What they founded came to be called Ufe-oke in one telling — the Ife of the hills — a daughter-Ife planted in the high rock, keeping the parent city’s name on the heights.

That the settlement went up onto the domes, rather than spreading on the easy land below, the tradition explains by need. The early people first lived at the foot of the hills; it was an age of raiding and unsettled war across the region, and the ruler — the accounts join here on Owa Agboogun, reckoned the first Owa, the first holder of Idanre’s crown — moved the community up off the plain and onto the heights, where the rock itself was the wall. The granite gave what no built rampart could: a single approachable face, a long and breathless climb, and above it a tableland that an enemy could not rush. Behind that defense the town settled in and stayed. The chronology before the colonial record is held in oral reckoning rather than dated document, and the founding is given variously across the deep past; what the sources agree on is duration. The people of Idanre lived on the boulders, the record says, for the better part of a millennium — eight hundred years and more, by the local telling, before they came down.

Idanre Hills (Oke Idanre), Ondo State, Nigeria. Photograph by Victor Akinfala, uploaded by Falaworld. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A town in such a place is a town built to the contour of the stone. The Owa’s palace stood high on the heights, with the open council-ground where the elders met; a quarter held the shrines, another the old court of justice; the dead were laid in burial-mounds among the rocks. Water came from a river that runs cold and clear off the high stone — the Arun, which the tradition holds to issue from the Orosun hill and counts among the holy features of the place, its water carried down for drinking and held to clean and to heal. There was a belfry, and an old mansion or court-house from the later years; there was the thunder-water, Omi Aopara, in its high pool. And binding the whole high town to the world below was the stair: hundreds of steps cut and trodden into the rock face, the only road up, climbed and re-climbed by every generation. In its present count the ascent runs to some six hundred and sixty steps, broken by five resting-stations where a climber stops to breathe before going on. To live at Idanre was to know that stair in the legs — to carry up to the heights everything the heights did not grow.

The choosing of such a place is itself a reading of the land. The domes that the surrounding Yoruba country crossed as obstacle, Idanre took as gift: the same sheer rock that turned an enemy back drank no spear and needed no garrison, and a community that set its town above the single climbable face had, in the granite, a defense that did not have to be built and could not be burned. The hills near the town carry the names a settled people gives its world — peaks and passes and watercourses each marked, each remembered. And the high ground was never read as bare refuge alone. To live among the rocks was to live close to the powers held to inhabit them: the founders in their graves, the river-power, the presence of the peak. The stronghold and the shrine were the same heights. That a defensive choice and a sacred one fall together here is not accident but the ordinary grammar of such a place — the ground that keeps a people safe becomes, over centuries of being lived on and buried in and prayed at, the ground their holiness is fixed to.

What the heights are read by

A sacred landscape is read through its features, and the hills of Idanre carry a set of marked places, each with its story, that the tradition gathers under a name the modern accounts render as the wonders of the hill. They are not curiosities hung on the scenery. They are the points at which the high country becomes legible — where rock and water and the print in the stone are taken to hold meaning, and where the founding powers of the place are met.

Foremost among them is the footprint named for Agboogun, pressed — the tradition holds — into the bare rock of the ascent. Its strangeness is this: that the print receives the foot of whoever sets a foot into it, the small foot and the large alike, fitting each as though made for it — and that it is held to refuse only one kind of foot, the foot of a witch or a wizard, which it will not take. So the mark is read at once as a wonder and as a test, a stone that knows the true from the false and measures every walker against itself. Set in the long climb, it makes the ascent into something more than a walk: a passage past a stone that reads all who climb.

The river belongs to this reading too. The Arun runs cold from the high rock, and its water is held pure and held to heal — a spiritual river, in the local account, whose clear water cleanses those who bathe in it. The thunder-water, Omi Aopara, lies in its high place; the burial-mounds keep the founders and the line of Owas who ruled from the heights; and the old palace and council-ground stand where the town’s authority sat — the seat from which the crown ruled, the ground on which the elders weighed the affairs of the people. The features are not separable from the kingship. Installation of a new Owa, ancestral rite, the keeping of the shrines — these belonged to the heights, and belong to them still, so that the high town is read less as ruin than as the proper and original ground of Idanre’s sacred and royal life.

A standing relic of the old palace on the heights of Idanre. Photograph by Knewkeed. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Over the whole hill stands Orosun, the high peak and the power named with it. The accounts of who Orosun is do not run as one, and the variation is worth keeping in view rather than smoothing away. In one telling Orosun is bound to the founding itself — the wife of Olofin, a woman of great spiritual power, from whose hill the cold Arun flows; in another she is named a goddess of children; in a third she is remembered as a woman of beauty whose life was cut short by intrigue, and the rite a keeping of her name. What the accounts hold in common is that Orosun presides over the heights and is honored there, and that the river and the festival run back to her. The peak and the deity share the name, as is common where a power is read in the land it inhabits; to go up to Orosun is to go up to both the place and the presence the place is named for.

The descent, and the town below

The decisive fact of Idanre’s modern history is a movement downward. In 1923, after the centuries on the heights, the people of Idanre came down off the hills and built a new town on the plain at the foot of the stair. The colonial era had reached the high country: missionaries had come up — the Reverend Gilbert Carter and others are remembered as having reached the heights in 1894 — and a primary school and a law-court were established on the hill in 1906. With the raiding wars long ended and a colonial peace imposed across the region, the old reason for the heights — defense, the rock as wall — had fallen away, and the daily cost of the place, every load carried up six hundred steps, no longer bought safety it needed to buy. So the community descended. The new Idanre rose on the plain, and the upper town, the place now called Old Oke-Idanre, was left to stand empty.

It was not abandoned in the full sense of the word. The descent ended the daily life of the high town but not its standing as the sacred and ancestral center of Idanre. The palace on the heights, the shrines, the burial-grounds, the river, the marked stones — these remained the proper ground of the kingship and the rite, and the people kept the way of return to them. The crown’s deep ceremonies, the honoring of the founders and of Orosun, the keeping of the holy features: these stayed bound to the heights even after the houses below emptied of their cooking-fires. The old town became a place one climbs to rather than lives in — a monument that is also still a shrine, visited, tended, and held.

The keeping of that bond is most visible in the Orosun festival. Each year, in the season the traditional calendar appoints — the modern accounts place it in May or into June — the people go back up to the hill to honor Orosun and the founders and the powers of the heights, with the drumming and the dance and the song that a great rite carries, and the prayers raised at the high places to the ancestors and to the presence of the hill. The festival is the annual re-climbing of the stair the descent might have ended: the gathering that carries the living town back up to the dead one, and makes of the empty heights, for its days, a peopled and sounding place again. The crown of Idanre — the Owa, the line that traces to Owa Agboogun who first led the people up — stands at its center.

A second image of the heights belongs here, in the palace courtyard that still stands open to the rock and the sky. The seat of the kingship has not moved its memory off the hill; the rite returns to where the rule began, and the high palace remains the architecture of the founding rather than a discarded shell.

The courtyard of the Owa’s palace at Old Idanre, high on the heights. Photograph by Inyang Effiong. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Reception and the heritage of the hill

In the documentary and heritage record the hills have come to be read as something the wider world has an interest in keeping. On 8 October 2007 Oke Idanre was entered on UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List — the register of sites a nation proposes for possible future inscription. The listing is tentative and not an inscription: it marks Idanre as a candidate put forward by Nigeria, not as a site the World Heritage Committee has yet inscribed. It is filed under the cultural category, and the nomination rests its case on the interlock of the natural and the human — the dramatic inselberg landscape and the long, unbroken settlement upon it, proposed together as a cultural landscape. The criteria cited point to the interchange of human values in the town-planning and the building among the rocks, to the standing testimony the high town bears to the living Yoruba civilization, and to the example the site offers of a community shaping its life to a demanding terrain over many centuries.

That framing — the marriage of a great landscape to a long human story — is the form in which Idanre now most often reaches readers beyond the town. The hills are read as a natural wonder: the bare domes, the high tableland, the cold river, a granitic country that holds endemic life found nowhere else. And they are read as a monument: the empty upper town with its palace and court and shrines, the six hundred and sixty steps, the marked stones, the festival that still climbs them. The two readings are not in tension. The case made for Idanre is precisely that the place is both at once — that the rock that gave a people their stronghold for the better part of a thousand years cannot be told apart from the people who made it their holy and royal seat, climbed it, ruled from it, buried their founders in it, and come back to it still.

What the heights hold, then, is a doubleness that the long history put there. Below, on the plain, the daily town goes on, with its church and its school and the colonial peace that drew the people down. Above, the old town keeps the older order — the crown’s first ground, the founders’ graves, the goddess of the peak, the print in the stone that takes every honest foot and refuses the false one. Between them runs the stair, climbed once a year by a whole people going up to keep faith with the place they came from, and climbed the rest of the year by those who go to look at the country and read, in the empty palace and the cold river and the worn steps, how long a community lived among the rocks and why it finally came down.

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