Who ruled Lagos?

Lagos grew up on a cluster of islands and sandbars in a lagoon on the Bight of Benin, in south-western Nigeria, where one of the few openings in the long coastal sandbar lets ocean shipping into calm inland waters. The lagoons connected it by canoe to towns along the coast and up the rivers into the Yoruba interior. That sheltered harbour made Lagos first a trading kingdom, then a notorious slave port, then a British colony and the capital of Nigeria. Its old Yoruba name is Eko; "Lagos" is Portuguese, usually explained as meaning "lakes".

The first inhabitants of the lagoon islands were fishing communities. By the 15th century Awori people, a branch of the Yoruba, had settled on the mainland at Isheri and then on the islands, where they farmed and fished. Portuguese ships reached the area around 1472. In the 16th century the expanding Kingdom of Benin, to the east, established a war camp on Lagos Island, and by around 1600 Benin had installed a ruler there. The Obas (kings) of Lagos traced their line to this appointment and paid tribute to Benin into the 19th century. Lagos also traded with the inland Yoruba states, including the Oyo Empire, which dominated the hinterland in the 1600s and 1700s.

Lagos became a major port of the Atlantic slave trade from the 1760s, when Oba Akinsemoyin invited Portuguese and other European traders to the island. Its importance grew in the early 19th century, as the collapse of Oyo and wars across Yorubaland produced large numbers of captives, and Brazilian and Portuguese dealers continued shipping them after Britain had banned the trade. A succession struggle between rival Obas, Kosoko and Akitoye, gave Britain its opening. In December 1851 the Royal Navy bombarded Lagos, drove out Kosoko and installed Akitoye, who signed a treaty ending the slave trade. Ten years later, in August 1861, Britain annexed Lagos as a colony under threat of force.

Colonial Lagos became a busy port for palm oil and other exports and home to a distinctive community of freed Africans returning from Sierra Leone, Brazil and Cuba, who built houses in a Brazilian style and formed an educated elite. The harbour entrance was dredged and protected with moles, a railway into the interior was built from the late 1890s, and when the northern and southern protectorates were merged in 1914, Lagos became the capital of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria within the British Empire. It was also the centre of nationalist politics and the press.

Nigeria became independent on 1 October 1960 with Lagos as its capital. In 1967 Lagos State was created around it. The oil boom of the 1970s brought new expressways, bridges, migrants from across the country and West Africa, and severe congestion, and in 1976 the government decided to build a new capital in the centre of the country. The federal government formally moved to Abuja in December 1991. Lagos nonetheless kept growing on reclaimed land and across the mainland, and it remains the commercial and financial centre of Nigeria and the base of its music and film industries.

The population of the metropolitan area is disputed, but most estimates put it between 15 and 20 million or more, making Lagos one of the largest cities in Africa.