Some lives reach us through diaries and letters. Others arrive only through someone else’s questions. Osifekunde of Ijebu belongs to the second kind. His name survives because his memory was recorded, shaped, and published in nineteenth-century Paris, leaving behind one of the earliest detailed written accounts of Ijebu society known in Europe.
Osifekunde was an Ijebu man from the Yoruba-speaking region of what is now south-western Nigeria. His story appears in the historical record through a French work published in 1845 by Marie Armand Pascal d’Avezac Macaya, titled Notice sur le pays et le peuple des Yébous en Afrique. That publication became a foundational European source on the Ijebu people, not because its author had travelled there, but because it drew on the recollections of a man who had lived there before being forced into the Atlantic world.
The moment everything changed, sold out of Africa in 1820
The defining rupture in Osifekunde’s life came in 1820, when he was sold out of Africa into the Atlantic slave system. That year anchors his story in a specific historical moment, at a time when the transatlantic trade still operated despite growing international pressure against it.
From the Yoruba hinterland, Osifekunde was carried away from his homeland and transported across the Atlantic. The record does not preserve the details of his capture or the early stages of his enslavement. What remains clear is that he was taken to Brazil, one of the largest destinations for enslaved Africans during the nineteenth century.
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Brazil and the long silence of bondage
Like countless others who endured enslavement in Brazil, Osifekunde’s daily life there left little trace in widely accessible documents. Years passed in which his experiences mattered deeply to him but were not recorded in ways that survived. That silence is not unusual. It reflects how the Atlantic system documented property and transactions far more reliably than human lives.
What would later make Osifekunde unusual was not the suffering he endured, but the knowledge he carried with him, knowledge of Ijebu towns, customs, trade routes, and political structures that European writers scarcely understood.
Paris and the interviews that shaped a book
By the late 1830s and early 1840s, Osifekunde was in Paris. There he came into contact with Pascal d’Avezac Macaya, a geographer and scholar interested in Africa and its peoples. D’Avezac recognised that Osifekunde’s memories offered something rare, a detailed internal view of Ijebu society at a time when European knowledge of the region was fragmentary and often second-hand.
Through a series of interviews, d’Avezac gathered Osifekunde’s recollections and organised them into a structured account. The result, published in 1845, followed the conventions of nineteenth-century European scholarship. It described geography, political authority, trade, travel, and social organisation, presenting Ijebu life in a form that European readers could recognise and classify.
The book is not Osifekunde’s autobiography. It is his knowledge filtered through another man’s framework. Even so, it remains a rare case in which an African informant’s memory formed the backbone of a major European text about his own society.
The life mask, memory made into an object
Around 1838, a life mask associated with Osifekunde was produced, commissioned by d’Avezac and later preserved in museum and archival collections. The mask freezes his features in plaster, transforming a living man into a lasting artefact.
The mask and the book belong together. One preserves words shaped into print. The other preserves a face turned into an object. Both reflect nineteenth-century ways of preserving knowledge, and both reveal how easily a human life could be reduced to what scholars wished to keep.
A second life in twentieth-century scholarship
Osifekunde’s account did not disappear after the nineteenth century. In 1967, historian P. C. Lloyd presented substantial material from d’Avezac’s work in Africa Remembered, Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by Philip D. Curtin.
In that context, Osifekunde appeared not merely as an ethnographic source, but as one of several African voices connected to the history of enslavement and displacement. The shift in framing invited readers to recognise the human origin of the account, even while acknowledging that it reached them through translation and editorial choice.
What remains unwritten
After the Paris interviews and the publication of the 1845 Notice, the record grows quiet again. No widely accessible sources describe Osifekunde’s later years or his death. His story ends where the archive ends, not because his life stopped, but because it was no longer recorded.
That absence is part of the story. Osifekunde was preserved in history for what he could provide, information about Ijebu, not for who he was beyond that role. His survival in print and plaster stands alongside the disappearance of his later life from the page.
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Why Osifekunde still matters
Osifekunde matters because he stands at the intersection of African memory and European record-keeping. His recollections shaped one of the earliest detailed written accounts of Ijebu, yet his own life remains only partially visible.
Through him, we see how African knowledge travelled across oceans, survived enslavement, and entered European libraries, even as the people who carried that knowledge were allowed to fade. His story reminds us that silence in the archive does not mean silence in life, and that what survives is often shaped by power rather than completeness.
Author’s Note
Osifekunde’s journey from Ijebu to Brazil and then to Paris shows how a life can be fractured and still leave a lasting mark. His words, captured in a nineteenth-century book, and his face, preserved in a life mask, endure as reminders that knowledge can survive even when a person’s story is left unfinished. What remains asks us to read carefully, remember responsibly, and recognise how much history depends on whose voice was written down.
References
Marie Armand Pascal d’Avezac Macaya, Notice sur le pays et le peuple des Yébous en Afrique, Paris, 1845.
Philip D. Curtin, editor, Africa Remembered, Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1967, includes “Osifekunde of Ijebu” by P. C. Lloyd.
Robin Law, “Early European Sources Relating to the Kingdom of Ijebu (1500 to 1700), A Critical Survey”, History in Africa, Volume 13, 1986.
Musée and archival catalogue records describing the life mask of Osifekunde commissioned by Pascal d’Avezac Macaya around 1838.
