Ibadan emerged during the nineteenth-century movements of Yoruba populations from the open grasslands of northern Yorubaland into the forest areas to the south. These migrations created new communities and altered the distribution of people across southwestern Nigeria. Ibadan was one of the principal settlements associated with this transformation.

The city developed a distinctive political response to the pressures of its environment. The excerpt characterizes Ibadan’s system as republicanism, placing it alongside Ijaye’s military dictatorship, Abeokuta’s federalism, and the Ekiti Parapo’s confederalism. These varied arrangements demonstrate the diversity of Yoruba constitutional experimentation.

Ibadan’s formation was part of a wider process in which population movement, settlement, and political innovation occurred together. The chapter links these nineteenth-century developments to the population map of southwestern Nigeria as it was known in the modern period.