Obaba Museum

Yeah, you’re wondering how valuable a car could be right?

Here’s your world’s most expensive car purchased with 500 humans in 1834. This is just one of the few horrors of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade where human beings were reduced to mere commodities. It is estimated that during the period of this triangular trade, nothing less than 10 million African slaves were transported outside Africa but that’s a story for another day.
Well I know you must be itching so badly to hear the name of this woman who wielded so much power and control over slaves that she could give out 500 of them for a single car she never drove, hmmm.

Here’s what we’d do, I’ll give you a bit of her bio then you guess her name. Fortunately her name is very popular in Lagos, Nigeria, in fact the first hint is that a very strategic monument is named after her.

Let’s begin!

She was the first Nigerian woman to buy a car in 1834 but never drove it; she simply leased it out to the white men in Lagos.
She was born in Abeokuta in 1805 (216yrs ago). She was a wealthy slave trader and sold many slaves to the Europeans, of course she traded in arms and ammunition and became one of the most influential female figures to wield so much power and affluence in Yorubaland.
She built a financial empire through arms and salt trade and of course her most booming business, slaving. She married Adele, an exiled Oba of Lagos years after the death of her first husband. This marriage was strategic to her economic and trade interest and being an opportunist, she gained economic and political power through the marriage and was able to build a business empire through the trade of salt and tobacco from Europe for slaves from Abeokuta.

In 1835, her husband Adele returned to his throne but died two years later making her a widow for the second time. She then helped install Adele’s son, Oluwole as the new king and married Yesufu Bada, his military advisor. She continued to grow her business and created a monopoly in the palm oil business and in slave trade. The ammunition she got from selling slaves were used in the Yoruba wars of the 1840s and 1850s. Her business acumen in this area made her very rich and powerful it was even particularly strange then that a woman would deal in arms so this woman was a real hustler. The constant tragedy of her story is usually the death of her benefactors, I wouldn’t understand if it was just fate, curse or …? Well the thing I want to say is that death soon struck again. The Oba of Lagos Oluwole died. This time around she got her brother-in-law Akitoye to become king and he rewarded her with stores in downtown Lagos. She was rumoured to own over three hundred personal slaves.

After slavery was repudiated in 1845 by European nations and commercial crops the new items of commerce, she expanded her empire by controlling the major items of commerce. She was the major channel in Lagos between European merchants and Traders. Her monopoly and control of power was broken in May of 1856 when she challenged the British Consul Benjamin Campbell after he railed against her secret slave trade with Europeans. She was exiled from Lagos and returned to her original homeland, Egba.

So if by this stage you’re still wondering who this powerful lady is, her name is Madam Efunroye Tinubu, an economic powerhouse and a dominant figure in 19th century Nigeria she died as the Iyalode of Egbaland in 1887. And if you’re wondering who Tinubu Square was named after, she’s the one and of course she’s in no way related to the former governor of Lagos state, and now President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the naming is simply a mere coincidence.

Thanks for reading through feel free to share and comment. ✌🏿🤪