Ibadan
Founded as a Yoruba war camp, Ibadan became Africa's first TV city and Nigeria's intellectual seed bank—now competing against Lagos's gravitational pull.
Ibadan began as a war camp. In the 1820s, Yoruba warriors fleeing the collapse of the Oyo Empire fortified a hillside position between the forest and savanna zones—a strategic ecotone that gave the settlement access to both ecological niches. By the 1850s, Ibadan had become the largest indigenous city in sub-Saharan Africa, with an estimated population exceeding 100,000, governed not by hereditary monarchy but by a military meritocracy that promoted warriors based on battlefield achievement.
That meritocratic founder effect shaped Ibadan's institutional DNA. The city became the site of Nigeria's first university (University of Ibadan, founded 1948), the first television station in Africa (WNTV, 1959), and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), which develops crop varieties for the entire continent. Ibadan functions as Nigeria's intellectual seed bank—an organism that produces knowledge exports even as its physical infrastructure struggles.
The metro area holds roughly four million people across a sprawl of brown rusted rooftops that earned it the nickname 'the brown city.' Ibadan's economy mixes agriculture—cocoa, cassava, palm oil—with a growing services sector anchored by healthcare and education. The University College Hospital is the most established teaching hospital in Nigeria, and the city's research corridor attracts federal and international investment.
But Ibadan's competitive exclusion pressure comes from Lagos, 120 kilometres to the south. As Lagos grew into a megacity of over 15 million, it siphoned corporate headquarters, young talent, and federal attention away from Ibadan. The Ibadan-Lagos expressway functions as a metabolic pipeline: goods, people, and capital flow south toward the coast. Ibadan's challenge is the classic second-city problem—maintaining relevance when a dominant neighbour absorbs the ecosystem's resources. Its intellectual infrastructure gives it a differentiation strategy unavailable to pure commercial cities, but whether that niche is sufficient remains an open question.