Long story short—she wasn’t allowed to take the throne, but then claimed she was a man, undressing to prove it—and ‘magically’ she now had male genitalia, so was allowed to take the throne. What’s really strange is the articles that describe this as though it were unremarkable, requiring no additional comment.
Just curious if there’s any more to this story—just an legend with no backup evidence? Was she transgender? (saw at least one article actually claiming she performed gender reassignment surgery or something like that on herself, in seven days)
Did she even exist? The wiki on the Oyo empire makes no mention of her, other than (maybe?) this one line:
“After this, Oba Orompoto led attacks to obliterate the Nupe to ensure Oyo was never threatened by them again.”
Some traditions of the oral record hold that she was miraculously transformed into a man before assuming the throne there
It seems she absolutely was a historical figure, regardless of that being true or not.
My 2 cents (as someone who is now a renown expert of medieval west African history, having read that wiki page) would be it went something like:
Some guy: "You can’t be king, only men can be king!’
Orompoto (surrounded by burly sword wielding attendants):“OK i’ve been magically transformed into a man, and am king now. Have a problem with that?”
Some guy: “gulps nope”
More interesting to me is the wiki page says she was the first to introduce cavalry, is that actually new to that bit of west Africa in the 14th century?
Maybe the first to introduce it to her people, but Wiki says they got it from a neighboring region:
" The key to Yoruba rebuilding of Oyo was a stronger military and a more centralized government. Taking a cue from their Nupe enemies (whom they called “Tapa”), the Yoruba rearmed with armor and cavalry.["
Yeah, a lot of ‘maybes’ surrounding this…I was curious if anyone knew of anything more concrete, perhaps in a more scholarly source than I’ve been able to find.
