Owo

Owo was a Yoruba settlement at the southern edge of the Yoruba Hills, between Ile-Ife and Benin City. Its oral tradition traced its founders to migrants from Ile-Ife led by sons of Oduduwa.

Between 1400 and 1600 Owo was the capital of an independent city-state; its ruler, Olowo Rerengejen, built the Aghofen palace in the fourteenth century, with around a hundred courtyards. Owo sometimes paid tribute to Benin, whose court imported its ivory carvings and recruited its artisans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It remained a self-governing kingdom through Oyo's rise and decline.