On Sunday, 13 October 1867, the Egba authorities at Abeokuta sanctioned a coordinated raid on every European mission station in the town. Yoruba speakers remember it as the Ifole — from *if'ole*, literally 'house-breaking'. By nightfall, four mission compounds had been ransacked, the Church Missionary Society parsonage at Ake stripped, the Wesleyan and Baptist stations looted, converts beaten, and the Albion iron printing press that Henry Townsend had landed at Abeokuta in December 1846 — the same press that produced *Iwe Irohin* from 3 December 1859 — destroyed beyond use. The missionaries (Townsend, the Wesleyan John Milum, the Southern Baptist William Colley, and the CMS schoolmasters) were given safe-conduct to Lagos within the week. None returned to Abeokuta for over a decade.
The Ifole was not a religious riot. It was a political answer to six years of accumulating Egba grievance against the British colony at Lagos. The crown's 1861 annexation of Lagos under Acting Consul William McCoskry and Commander Norman Bedingfield had cut the Egba off from their Atlantic trade and re-routed customs revenue from the Ogun River to Lagos Customs House. Worse, in the Ijaye War (1860–1865) and the subsequent Ibadan campaigns, the Egba accused the Lagos-based missionaries — particularly Townsend — of running letters, intelligence and Snider rifles to the Ibadan side and to Governor John Hawley Glover, whose 1865 Lagos Constabulary the Egba regarded as a forward force. The expulsion order, issued by the Alake Okukenu and the *Ogboni* council, gave the missionaries one warning before the houses were broken. The instruction from the palace was that property could be taken but no European life. No European was killed; the rule held.
The consequence for Nigerian communications was permanent. *Iwe Irohin fun awon Ara Egba ati Yoruba* — the first newspaper printed in any African language south of the Sahara — never resumed publication. The October 1867 issue, half-set in type when the Ake compound was broken, was never run. The Albion press was hauled into the street and smashed; surviving type was scavenged for fishing weights and ornaments. When the CMS finally returned to Abeokuta in 1880 under James Johnson, they did not rebuild the press; vernacular printing for the Egba and Yoruba interior moved to Lagos and stayed there.
The Ifole also marks the moment colonial penetration of Yorubaland switched from a missionary-and-trader model to a military-and-administrative one. Glover's response was to tighten the Lagos blockade of Abeokuta through 1868–1872, choking palm-oil exports through the Ogun. By the time Governor Gilbert Carter's expedition marched out of Lagos in 1893 to impose treaties on Ibadan, Oyo and Abeokuta, the missionary buffer that had existed between British power and the Egba state in 1867 was gone. The Ifole had stripped it out twenty-six years earlier.
One small irony. The Wired series in this archive opens with the 1846 Albion press at Ake as the technology Nigeria adopted earliest relative to Britain — barely a decade behind the cheap iron-press revolution of the 1830s. The same archive must now record that the press lasted twenty-one years before a political act of the Egba state ended it. No subsequent communications technology Nigeria adopted — telegraph, telephone, radio, television, GSM, internet — has ever been physically destroyed by a Nigerian polity. The press is the only one.