In July 1754, just seventeen days after his installation, the new king of Oyo was ordered to die.
His name was Labisi, and he had been selected to rule Oyo, one of the most powerful Yoruba kingdoms of the eighteenth century. He was known as the Alaafin, the title borne by the kings of the time. His rule, however, did not mean he could do whatever he pleased. Oyo had a council of seven great nobles known as the Oyo Mesi, who played an indispensable role in selecting and approving each new Alaafin, and performing necessary rituals that installed him as king. Moreover, these nobles also had the authority and power to challenge the continued rule of an Alaafin. When the council decided that a king had become unacceptable, its leader, the Bashorun, could present the Alaafin with a calabash, sometimes empty and sometimes holding parrots' eggs. Whichever was presented, the message was always clear: the king had lost the support of the council and was expected to take his own life to pave the way for the renewal of government.
The calabash came for Labisi seventeen days after his installation and he complied with its message. This however did not stop the same message from being delivered to his successor, Awonbioju months later.
Oyo's constitution contained something most of Europe's monarchies of the time did not: a lawful, peaceful-looking procedure for removing a king. It never waited for a succession crisis, a palace revolt or an invading army. The throne was powerful, but the person occupying it remained subject to a deadly check and balance from an independent council.
Oyo was not alone in this development. Across pre-colonial Africa, different societies developed ways of challenging political authority. Some could remove individual rulers. Others went further, overthrowing entire dynasties and establishing new systems of government.
The Concept of Absolute Power
A recurring principle in African political thought was that power did not belong to the person who held it. It belonged to the ancestors, to the land, to the lineage or to the office itself, and it was lent to a ruler on conditions. A ruler who failed those responsibilities could lose the position he had been given.
Among the Akan of present-day Ghana, the stool is the symbol of chiefly authority. A chief is enstooled when installed and can be destooled when removed. The stool belongs to the institution and the lineage, not simply to the individual sitting on it. A chief could therefore lose his position if those with the authority to install him decided he should no longer hold it.
Even the rulers of the Asante empire were not exempt. Asantehene Kusi Obodum was forced to abdicate after a disastrous battle in 1764. Kofi Karikari was forced out in 1874 after a British army burned Kumasi, and his successor, Mensa Bonsu, was removed in 1883.
Oyo had its own arrangement. The Oyo Mesi, who could challenge the Alaafin, were themselves part of a wider political and religious structure that included the Ogboni, an institution associated with the Earth and its sacred authority. The king was not the only person who mattered in the running of the kingdom, and the Oyo Mesi did not operate in a political vacuum.
Power could be challenged. But what happened when those entrusted with challenging it decided they wanted it for themselves?
When The Check Becomes The Tyrant
Just like in every system, power could be abused in pre-colonial Africa. Oyo's history gives us an insight into this abuse. You see, the Bashorun responsible for Labisi's removal was a man named Gaa, also known as Gaha. He had the authority to challenge the Alaafin, but he gradually turned that authority into a means of controlling the kingdom himself. Instead of protecting Oyo from an oppressive king, he became the man the kings had to fear.
Between 1754 and about 1768, he forced three Alaafins to their deaths. One of them, Agboluaje, reportedly refused to declare war on a town Gaa wanted attacked. That refusal cost him his life. The council's power to remove a king had become a weapon in the hands of a man who wanted to rule without wearing the crown.
Eventually, Gaa's control was challenged. In 1774, Alaafin Abiodun, with the help of the commander of the Oyo army, defeated him and restored royal authority. But the kingdom had already been weakened by years of internal conflict. The struggle between the king and the powerful chiefs exposed divisions that would continue to trouble Oyo.
There is a lesson here. The lesson Oyo teaches is not that African constitutions were perfect. It is that they were real constitutions, with real checks and real failures, and that people argued and fought over them in the way people do everywhere. Having a way to remove a bad ruler does not automatically mean the people exercising that power will act in everyone's interest. Oyo had a mechanism for checking the king, but it could not prevent the man controlling that mechanism from becoming a tyrant himself.
Rebellion, not Revolution
In the 1950s, British anthropologist Max Gluckman examined an interesting feature of political life in several African kingdoms. People could openly express anger towards their rulers, challenge their conduct and even rebel against them without necessarily wanting to abolish the system of kingship. In his words, people rebelled frequently, but they rebelled against particular kings, not against kingship. A community might reject a particular ruler and demand his removal, only to replace him with another member of the same royal family. The throne remained, only the person sitting on it changed.
Gluckman saw this attitude even in ritual. At the climax of the Swazi Incwala, the great annual kingship ceremony, the king appears as a monster of legend while men and women raise what one account calls 'a chant of hate,' expressing the love and hatred his own people feel towards him. Gluckman read rites like this as 'rituals of rebellion,' in which hostility to authority was voiced openly so that the order itself could survive.
The idea was that a society could give expression to its anger towards authority through established rituals without necessarily destroying the political order that authority represented.
It helps explain why removing a ruler and overthrowing a government are two different things. But African history also has examples of people who decided that changing the person on the throne was no longer enough.
When The Systems Fell
In 1776, in Futa Toro, along the Senegal River, a movement of Muslim clerics known as the Torodbe overthrew the Denianke dynasty that had ruled the region for generations.
The Denianke rulers bore the title Satigi. Their authority had come under increasing opposition from Muslim scholars and clerics who challenged the existing political and religious order. The Torodbe movement drew strength from religious grievances and dissatisfaction with the ruling dynasty, eventually bringing an end to its rule.
What followed was a new Islamic state known as the Almamy of Futa Toro. Its ruler, the almamy, was selected through an elective arrangement rather than simply inheriting the throne through the old royal dynasty. Abdul Kader Kan became its first major ruler and is remembered for his resistance to French attempts to expand their influence and enslave people in the region.
The change was significant. The people who overthrew the Denianke did not simply look for another Satigi. They established a different political order, with a different basis for deciding who had the right to rule.
But the story does not end with the overthrow of the old dynasty. The new ruling class developed its own hierarchies, and slavery remained part of the society. Hence, the revolution changes the people in power and the principles upon which they governed without removing every injustice that existed before. A few decades later, another movement would transform an even larger part of West Africa and this came in 1804.
In 1804, the Islamic scholar Usman dan Fodio led a far larger uprising against the ruling authorities of the Hausa kingdoms in what is now northern Nigeria. For years, he had preached against practices he considered contrary to Islam. His criticisms, adopted by his followers, included the oppression of Muslims, unjust taxation and the conduct of rulers who, in his view, failed to govern according to Islamic principles.
The conflict grew into a jihad that changed the political map of the region. Several Hausa ruling dynasties were displaced, and their territories were incorporated into a new political order: the Sokoto Caliphate. The caliphate became organised around a central religious and political authority, with emirates governed by emirs who acknowledged the authority of the caliph. It also produced an extensive body of Islamic scholarship and political writing that explained and defended the new system of government. That is a revolution in the full sense: a new system, built on a new idea of legitimate rule.
This was more than the removal of a bad king. The old ruling houses had been challenged, their claims to authority rejected, and a new political system established in their place. Yet the new order had its own contradictions. The Sokoto Caliphate became deeply involved in the slave trade, and enslaved labour supported important parts of its economy, including agricultural production. The movement that had challenged the injustices of existing rulers did not create a society free of oppression. Removing a ruler was one thing. Building a government that would not repeat the failures of the old one was another.
A Revolution Remembered
Some societies preserved stories of political revolution in their accounts of how their communities came to be governed.
Among the Kikuyu of central Kenya, one such tradition tells of a despotic ruler whose conduct became so unbearable that the people eventually overthrew him. Jomo Kenyatta recorded this account in his 1938 book, Facing Mount Kenya.
According to the tradition, the people had once lived under a king named Gikuyu. After his removal, they decided against having another king. Instead, political authority would be held by generations of elders, with one generation eventually handing over responsibility to the next. This transfer was celebrated by a ceremony known as itwika. The two principal generation groups involved were Maina and Mwangi. Rather than allowing one generation to hold the reins of government indefinitely, the system provided for a transfer of authority after a period of years. The last such transfer took place around 1898–99, when Maina handed over to Mwangi. The next was expected in the 1920s.
However, colonial rule interrupted the arrangement. When preparations began for another itwika around 1925, the British colonial government prohibited the associated songs and dances, announcing them as seditious. Hence, the transfer could not take place.
What The Record Shows
Taken together, these histories tell us something important about how pre-colonial African societies understood power. They were not all governed by rulers who could do as they pleased, and the people living under them were not without ways of challenging their authority.
In Oyo, the king could be compelled to leave the throne. Among the Akan, chiefs could be destooled. In some kingdoms, rebellion meant removing an unpopular ruler and replacing him with another. In Futa Toro and the territories transformed by Usman dan Fodio's jihad, people went further and dismantled existing political systems. Among the Kikuyu, a tradition of overthrowing a despotic king became an explanation for a system in which political authority passed between generations.
None of these arrangements was perfect. Gaa turned a check on royal power into an instrument of personal rule. The Islamic states that emerged from reform movements continued to rely on slavery. And the Kikuyu system, while offering an interesting way of organising political succession, was not a modern electoral democracy.
But these histories deserve to be part of how we discuss African political thought. They show that questions about the limits of power, the removal of bad rulers and the peaceful transfer of authority were not foreign to African societies.
And that brings us to an uncomfortable question.
Today, conversations about term limits, political succession and military coups across Africa often take place without much reference to the continent's own political history. Yet long before colonial administrations introduced their systems of government, African societies had developed different ways of deciding who could rule, how long they could remain in power and what happened when they failed.
If Oyo could compel a king to surrender his throne, and the Kikuyu had a system for handing political authority from one generation to another, why does the question of leaving office remain such a difficult one for so many of today's leaders?
