Abstract
The Ijebu People inhabit the South-Central part of Yoruba land 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.
The geographical landscape of Ijebu Ode local government comprises extensive fertile soil suitable for agriculture.¹ The Local Government has a little bit of Forest reserve in the rural areas. The Local Government covers an area of 82,986.62 hectares. It is located approximately between longitude 3°55E and 40°6E and latitudes 60°42 and 6°54N.Like all other local governments in Ogun state, the Local Government falls distinctively under the generally hot and dry harmattan dry season (from November to February/March) and the warm and wet raining season (from April to October )the rain reach the peak in the months of June and September with a very short dry period in the month of August.² This phenomenon is referred to as the double maxima rain. The Local Government experiences an annual mean rainfall of between 1523mm to 2031mm with an average temperature of 3°c throughout the year.
The early history of the Ijebu people is both obscure and uncertain. It is obscure in that until barely two hundred years ago nothing was written of our history. It is generally believed that the province now called Ijebu was at one time a desolate, uninhabited forest waste and that it was populated by three waves of migration from the East. Some have claimed that the East here referred to was Wadai; others would go so far as to maintain that it was Mecca. The Ijebu people, like the other Yoruba people, trace their origin to the East. The Ijebu people, however, have not, so far as we can ascertain, claimed Nimrod or any of these mythical persons as their ancestor. However this may be, the Ijebu people claimed that their ancestors came from Ife. Ife appears to have been the first dwelling place settled by the migrants from the East. It was from thence that some of the new settlers set out again to discover and master new lands. Thus our history, like that of the Yoruba people, of which we form a part, begins with Ife, often described as "the cradle of the Yoruba race”.³
