Abeokuta means under the rock, and the name is not figurative. In the 1830s, people displaced by the collapse of the Oyo empire and the wars that followed took shelter in the caves and clefts of a granite outcrop, and stayed.
What is unusual about Abeokuta is how much of the country's subsequent history came out of it. The concentration of people from this town who went on to shape Nigeria is disproportionate to its size by a wide margin, and locals will list them for you unprompted.
Centenary Hall was built in 1950 to mark a hundred years of peace after the last inter-tribal war — a commemoration of the absence of something, which is a rarer kind of monument than it should be.
The Ogun river below the rock — odo Ogun — has been the town's boundary, its laundry and its argument with the neighbouring farmland for two centuries.
