Long before there was a Lagos Colony, there was a lagoon and a string of fishing-and-salt-making settlements on the islands and creeks behind Bar Beach. The first settlers were the Awori sub-group of the Yoruba — Olofin and his sons — who arrived from Isheri in the late 15th century and parcelled out the islands by paddle and pole. Each son or war-captain who 'caught' a stretch of land became its Idejo ('owner of the soil') — and the Idejo white-cap chiefs (Oloto, Olumegbon, Onikoyi, Aromire, Ojora, Onitolo, Oluwa, Elegushi, Oniru and others) were recognised as the original allodial holders of every square foot of what is now Lagos Island, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Lekki and the Eti-Osa foreshore.
The Oba of Lagos, when the throne was created by the Bini conqueror Ashipa c. 1630, was the political and ritual head of the town — but he was not a land-owner in the Idejo sense. Under the customary settlement that hardened over the 17th–19th centuries, the Oba 'reigned' over Lagos; the Idejo 'owned' it. When the Oba allocated a stranger a building plot, he did so as trustee for the Idejo whose territory the stranger was entering, and a token (kola, gin, or a few cowries) was paid to the relevant Idejo House. This is the foundational fact of Lagos land law: from the 1500s, land in Lagos was family land, vested in Idejo Houses, not state land vested in the Crown or the Oba.
Three consequences flowed from this arrangement and still shape the city today. First, the Idejo Houses kept genealogies and oral land-registers — the basis on which descendants would later prove title in colonial and post-colonial courts. Second, every transaction in Lagos land — sale, mortgage, lease — required (and still requires, in the customary view) the assent of the relevant Idejo family head. Third, the Idejo system institutionalised the idea that land in Lagos has private, hereditary owners who pre-date every government that has ever sat in the city. The Cession of 1861, the Lugard reforms, the 1978 Land Use Act and the 21st-century Eko Atlantic project would all collide with that single inherited fact — and none of them has ever fully dislodged it.
By the eve of the Atlantic slave trade's last decades (1780s–1850s), Lagos under the Idejo had become a commercial entrepôt: salt-pans on Lekki, fishing camps at Ikate-Elegushi, palm-oil beaches at Badagry, a slave market on the Marina. The Idejo Houses collected tolls on canoe-landings, granted leases to Brazilian and Sierra Leonean returnees, and underwrote the Oba's tribute to the Kingdom of Benin. When Commander Bedingfield's gunboats appeared off Lagos in 1851, they sailed into a city whose land was already, by 350 years of practice, privately owned by families who had never imagined sovereignty and land tenure as the same question.