Olu Abejoye

Names and chronology

The palace uses the spellings Abejoye and Abejioye, while Moore printed Abojioye.

Anthropologist P. C. Lloyd found that little was known about the Olus who reigned before the mid-18th century. He noted discrepancies between two king lists available by the 1950s and reported that most elders could not name more than half of the earlier rulers. Lloyd suggested that this loss of names may partly reflect a ritual practice in which past Olus were invoked collectively rather than individually.

Fonseca's reconstruction lists Omoluyere and Abejoye as successive 17th-century rulers, identifies Abejoye as Dom Matias, and identifies Akenjoye as Dom Ludovico Domingos, with an approximate reign of 1675–1709.

Possible identification with Dom Matias

Accession and parentage

The principal narrative about Dom Matias was written by the Capuchin Bonaventura da Firenze, who worked in Warri in the late 1650s. Bonaventura wrote that the previous Olu's Portuguese wife died in childbirth together with her child, after which the king had four sons and four daughters by African women. The eldest son, Matthias, was seven or eight when his father died. Court officials left the royal title to the boy but governed for nine years, transferring full authority to him when he was about eighteen. The missionaries hoped that the king would set an example by entering a monogamous Christian marriage. Matias said that he would do so if a white wife could be found, as his father had married one. A 20-year-old woman living on São Tomé agreed to the marriage with the consent of her parents and was ceremonially received in Warri. Fonseca dates the marriage to 1659 or 1660.

Conflict with Portuguese officials and traders prevented the mission from becoming permanent. The two Capuchins left Warri for São Tomé around the beginning of 1660, intending to seek reinforcements, but were imprisoned there and sent away. Although they were later cleared in Lisbon and given permission to return, neither resumed the Warri mission.

Appeal to Portugal and succession

In October 1673 the Olu gave a visiting Franciscan a letter to the king of Portugal. He complained that no priest had come since Angelo Maria da Ajaccio's departure, asked for missionaries, and described the decline of Portuguese shipping to Warri. Fonseca attributes the appeal to Matias.

No effective response followed until 1684. Fonseca states that Dom Ludovico Domingos was then Olu and identifies him with Akenjoye, not Abejoye. A later mission produced a letter dated 16 January 1690 from an Olu called Lewis II, granting land for a Capuchin church and residence. The missionary Francesco da Monteleone described this ruler as young and said that he had inherited the wives of both his father and a deceased elder brother. Kenny labels the brother Lewis I and considers the two brothers likely sons of Matias or of the ruler called Domingos II in a suspect 1653 letter. These records establish a change of ruler between the 1673 appeal and the 1680s, but the surviving sources do not produce a single, uncontested match between the Portuguese names and the Itsekiri king lists.