Our forefathers warned against this posture of dangerous complacency. In both the careless handling of firearms and the timid caressing of venomous reptiles, they frowned at such folly in two graphic proverbs, warning that: “A kì í fi ọwọ tẹtẹrẹ mú ìbọn; a kì í fi ọwọ rọrọ mú ejo” – you do not handle a gun carelessly, nor do you grasp a snake with soft, hesitant hands.
History provides a stern warning about what happens when public health complacency meets administrative lethargy. Between 1827 and 1831, in Ọyọ-Ilé, the majestic capital of the Old Oyo Empire, the people tried to ignore the subtle signs of danger. But as the Yoruba say, bullets eventually escaped, the gun boomed, and the snake’s bite led to documented catastrophe.
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A strange, debilitating disease called Pẹhẹ had suddenly sprouted from nowhere. It was an infectious, highly contagious disease that waged a deadly, relentless war on the human respiratory system. Pẹhẹ ravaged the capital of the Empire, a tragic chapter meticulously recorded by the legendary historian Samuel Johnson on page 254 of his monumental work, History of the Yoruba.
Because it is only the beginning of a war that human beings can anticipate and never its ultimate ending, by 1831, Pẹhẹ had mutated from a localized health scare into an uncontrollable pestilence. In that fatal year, it breached the sacred palace walls and took away the highly revered supreme monarch of the Empire, Aláàfin Májòótú. When Májòótú succumbed to the breath-stealing plague, Aláàfin Amodo ascended a throne already sitting atop a crumbling nation.
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The tragic death of Aláàfin Májòótú’s in the hands of an ordinary pandemic stands as an eternal reminder that not even the most sacred grove or exalted royal court is spared when pestilence wages war. Plagues are fiercely democratic; they respect neither crown nor stool.
This tragic historical truth brings to mind one of my favorite musical lines by Kelani Yesufu, the legendary Egba-born Yoruba Sakara music singer and social poet. It was in a masterwork track that the bard titled “Ikú ò Mo Olówó”. It is a profound philosophical treatise asserting that death is no respecter of wealth, crown, or social status.
Yesufu composed the track as a grieving tribute to Shittu Shitta Alabi, his master lead drummer, who suddenly slumped and died on stage at Sokenu Village, Abeokuta, during a live performance in 1972. In a haunting symbol of lifelong devotion to craft, Alabi passed into eternity with his Sakara drum still clutched tightly in his lifeless hands.
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Kelani Yesufu’s musical prowess and cultural prominence reached its zenith during the mid-to-late 20th century. Standing tall alongside contemporaries like S. Aka (Sanusi Ayinde Aka, Baba Wahidi, a.k.a. Omo Lawale), the legendary Sakara genre lord Yusuff Olatunji, Haruna Ishola, and Lefty Salami, Yesufu combined traditional Yoruba instrumentation, specifically the solemn, melancholic goje violin and rhythmic Sakara hand drums, to attack public decay and social vices.
Kelani became renowned as an against-the-grain musician due to his unorthodox, cutting poetry. He deployed his storytelling craft in fighting well-known social crusades, manifested in tracks like “Emu Ògùrò” (where he mercilessly attacked reckless drunkenness) and “April Fool,” another of his sharp, satirical social commentaries.
Yesufu was the courageous bard who first dared to break the ancient cultural taboo surrounding venereal diseases with his famous track “Àtòsí” (Gonorrhea). Before Yesufu’s bold intervention, Yoruba society was conditioned to mask the disease under the deceptive, romanticised label Àrùn Gbajúmò — an infection reserved for notables and men of means. In his track, Yesufu urged society to face hard epidemiological facts, dismantling the hypocritical contradictions inherent in romanticising a disgraceful affliction simply because it affected the elite.
While lamenting the death of his master drummer in a grief-encrusted voice, Kelani sermonized on the absolute inevitability and impartiality of death. The track eventually became a sacred document frequently cited by cultural historians, a poignant testament to the profound, lifelong spiritual bond developed between traditional Yoruba vocalists and their lead drummers. It was that exact same symbiotic bond that existed between Yusuff Olatunji and his lead drummer, Kasumu Ishola Sanni; between Haruna Ishola and Raufu Ojubanire; between Lefty Salami and Nosiru Akanmu; and between the fiery Ayinla Omowura and Adewole Alao, famously known as Onílù Olà, the drummer of fortune. Plagues, like death itself, sever these human bonds without mercy.
In Ọyọ-Ilé, Pẹhẹ claimed the lives of thousands of citizens in rapid succession. The pestilence was reported to be the devastating climax of a four-year cycle of recurrent epidemic outbreaks in the empire’s capital. It provoked a historic visit to Ọyọ-Ilé in 1827 by the famous Cornish explorer, Richard Lander. Lander had arrived in the Empire’s capital riding on the fame of his association with solving the mystery of the course and outlet of the River Niger, alongside the Scottish explorer Hugh Clapperton. After Clapperton and other members of the expedition succumbed to tropical illnesses, Lander was commissioned by the British government to return, sailing with his brother from Badagry to Bussa by canoe, where they were eventually captured and ransomed.
When Lander arrived at Ọyọ-Ilé, he recorded his astonishment at the crude yet organised quarantine structures implemented by the empire’s authorities. The traditional council had taken victims of Pẹhẹ to an isolation centre, established inside a dense forest roughly half a mile outside the city walls. In his journal, Lander observed that the sick were placed systematically “underneath the branches of trees…”
The strict customary law of the empire dictated that the next of kin of Pẹhẹ victims were solely responsible for bringing food and water to the perimeter of the forest isolation grounds.
However, this outbreak severely crippled the empire because it arrived alongside a devastating combination of external and internal crises. A brutal drought had covertly walked into Ọyọ-Ilé that same year. Consequently, the metropolis suffered the double agony of severe famine and political instability, which had commenced a decade earlier due to internal rivalries. The Pẹhẹ pandemic was like rubbing coarse salt into an open, bleeding wound. Historical descriptions of Pẹhẹ paint it as a highly contagious respiratory illness that caused swift, terrifying fatalities across all social strata. Aláàfin Májòótú and Ọyọ-Ilé’s ancient political structures were completely overwhelmed.
In his notes, Lander helped preserve the oral memory of this tragedy. He recorded that the combination of acute famine and political turmoil severely worsened the plight of those confined to the forest isolation center. Because the victims were largely drawn from poor backgrounds, many ended up dying of sheer starvation rather than the viral load of Pẹhẹ itself.
It was recorded that although Pẹhẹ directly killed thousands in 1831, Ọyọ-Ilé was already suffocating from the loss of more than 100,000 of its inhabitants to famine, civil strife, and disease combined. This massive health disaster shattered Old Oyo’s demographic foundation and completely paralysed its military leadership. It dramatically accelerated the empire’s fall to Fulani invasions and internal rebellions, culminating in the total evacuation and permanent abandonment of Ọyọ-Ilé as the capital between 1835 and 1836. Plagues do not merely kill bodies; if mishandled, they topple empires.
If pre-colonial Nigeria was naive in curtailing the spread of infectious pathogens, centuries later, it is outright criminal for modern authorities to follow suit. Long before modern medicine, diseases like chickenpox and smallpox attacked the rich and the poor with equal, indiscriminate fury.
In response to their inability to comprehend or halt the ravages of smallpox, the ancient Yoruba deified the disease out of sheer terror. Smallpox was elevated to the pantheon of sacred deities as Ṣọnpọnná. Because of the mysterious way it struck from nowhere, the deity was given fearful, exalted appellations. One was Olóde, “The Owner of the Outside” or “Lord of the Open Space,” referencing how the contagion traveled invisibly through open air and wind; Ọbalúayé “The King Who is Lord of the World”; and Babalúayé “The Father Who is the Lord of the Earth.”
Till this day in ancient Ilé-Ifẹ, the annual Ìtàpá festival is celebrated to memorialise those ancient pox outbreaks. When you observe the intricate lesions of white chalk painted across the bodies of Ọbàtálá priests during the sacred festival, you are looking at a living artistic ritual depicting the skin pustules suffered by their ancestors.
Ṣọnpọnná priests were both deeply revered and terrifyingly feared as specialist medical practitioners. They presided over the containment of pox outbreaks, performing ritual sacrifices, administering botanical variolation (inoculation), caring for the afflicted, and executing strict, solitary burials for those killed by the disease to prevent further contamination.
Until its global eradication in the 20th century, no disease struck deeper dread into the Yoruba psyche than smallpox, owing to its high transmission rate, swift lethality, and unpredictable seasonality. The disease routinely peaked between January and February, the dry, dusty harmattan months, proving itself to be an opportunistic killer that exploited seasonal vulnerability.
Similarly, cholera has been an explosive, killer epidemic in Nigeria’s history. It struck water supplies and wiped out entire communities overnight. But no historical outbreak matched the terrifying speed of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.
Originating in March 1918 in Kansas, USA, and carried across oceans by returning World War I troops, the “Spanish Flu” quickly earned the grim distinction of killing more people than any other pandemic in human history. It became the first truly nationwide pandemic to sweep through Nigeria, imported directly by maritime passengers and crew arriving at coastal ports.
Lagos was the epicentre of the tragedy. Public historian Oludamola Adebowale notes that passengers who contracted the virus in Accra, Gold Coast (modern Ghana), boarded ships bound for Lagos and seeded the contagion upon arrival. The spread was so violent that within the first two months, maritime quarantines completely collapsed. Lagos lost 1.5 per cent of its entire population of 81,941 people in a matter of weeks. Out of a national population estimated at 18 million in 1918, over 500,000 Nigerians died within six months, with between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of the entire population contracting the virus.
From Lagos, the flu followed trade routes like wildfire. In 1918 October, Abeokuta was to get its first index patient. Ibadan got its on October 5, 1918 and gradually, Oyo, Ilorin, Minna, Bida, Jebba, Zaria, Kano, and Bauchi got theirs. Calabar and Onitsha got theirs on October 14, 1918 while it was spread farther by ships through Forcados port to Warri and Asaba, Port Harcourt and Bonny. Traveling through passengers on River Niger, the Spanish flu pandemic spread to Lokoja, Sokoto, Maiduguri, as well as to other parts of the Northern Nigeria, so much that, by December 1918, the whole of the country had completely bowed to the Spanish flu.
Traveling via passengers along the River Niger, the Spanish flu penetrated Lokoja, Sokoto, and Maiduguri. By December 1918, the entire geographic entity of Nigeria had completely bowed to the devastating flu. With this mountain of historical tragedy, and our recent, painful experience during COVID-19, Nigeria’s current dilly-dallying on the reported Abuja Ebola case is utterly incomprehensible.
Ebola is not an abstract threat. Since its discovery in September 1976 along the Ebola River in Yambuku, (in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire) where it claimed its first victim, a local school headmaster named Mabalo Lokela, the virus has exhibited one of the highest case-fatality rates known to science. Historically, regional outbreaks in the DRC have claimed 4,690 lives out of 9,742 confirmed cases, representing a terrifying crude case fatality rate (CFR) of roughly 48 per cent.
Nigeria should know better because we have faced this monster before. In 2014, Nigeria admirably fought and won a decisive war against Ebola. When Patrick Sawyer, an index patient from Liberia, arrived at First Consultants Medical Centre in Lagos, the nation stood on the precipice of unimaginable catastrophe. It took the extraordinary courage of Dr Stella Ameyo Adadevoh, the timeless amazon who sacrificed her life so millions might live, alongside her medical director, Dr Benjamin Ohiaeri, and their heroic team, to halt the chain of transmission.
In a modern parallel to the strict isolation protocols of Ọyọ-Ilé two centuries prior, Dr Adadevoh and Dr Ohiaeri stood firm against intense diplomatic pressure from Liberian officials who demanded that Sawyer be discharged to attend an international conference in Calabar. Instead, they held him in a makeshift containment unit, locked down their hospital, and immediately alerted health authorities. Dr Adadevoh paid the ultimate price, contracting the virus and passing away on 19 August, 2014, alongside noble colleagues. But her brave stand kept Nigeria’s total casualty count to just 20 cases and eight deaths — a miraculous feat praised globally.
Look at how other nations manage this threat today. Consider Rwanda. Despite its proximity to the DRC and despite the busy border city of Gisenyi, sitting directly adjacent to DRC’s Lake Kivu region, Rwanda has consistently maintained zero recorded Ebola cases during major regional surges. This is not by luck; it is by design. The Rwandan Ministry of Health and the Rwanda Biomedical Center maintain active, continuous border screening, rigorous contact tracing protocols, and specialised containment facilities in sites like Rusizi, Rubavu, and Kigali. They understand that public health requires constant vigilance, not reactive panic.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, when reports of a new Ebola threat surfaced, the government reacted with its typical bureaucratic fanfare: on 9 June, a ₦10 billion emergency intervention fund was approved, and a Presidential Task Force on Ebola Virus Disease Preparedness was constituted under the chairmanship of the Chief of Staff to the President. Months later, as reports of new cases trickle into the Federal Capital Territory, Nigerians are rightly asking: Where is the readiness? What tangible containment infrastructure has been built? How has the ₦10 billion emergency allocation been utilised?
We cannot afford to treat a deadly pathogen with administrative levity or political rhetoric. As our ancestors warned us through the sacred memory of Aláàfin Májòótú, when a government fails to cut the sapling of an epidemic early, it will eventually grow into an uncontainable beast that demands the ultimate sacrifice from the nation. Nigeria must wake up, stop caressing the nozzle of the rifle, put down the head of the rattlesnake, and act before history repeats its grim legacy once more.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
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