On 6 August 1861, Oba Dosunmu, under the guns of HMS *Prometheus*, signed the Treaty of Cession that transferred 'the port and Island of Lagos' to Queen Victoria. The treaty was unequivocal at the level of sovereignty — Britain became the political authority — but on the question of land it was studiously ambiguous. Article II promised the Oba and the Idejo chiefs that 'the inhabitants…shall be allowed to enjoy quietly all the lands…which they now hold and use'. The British read this as a personal-use guarantee; the Idejo read it as a confirmation of their pre-existing ownership. Sixty years of litigation flowed from that single sentence.
The Colonial Office's first move was the Lagos Land Ordinance of 1863, which empowered the Governor to grant Crown leases over 'unoccupied' land. Officials proceeded as if the lagoon foreshore, the swamps behind the Marina, and the Lekki peninsula were *terra nullius* — vacant land available to the Crown. The Idejo Houses sued, again and again, through the 1870s and 1880s, mostly losing in the colonial Supreme Court whose judges held that the Cession had transferred radical title to the Crown. The Houses kept files of land-tribute receipts; the colonial government kept building.
Matters came to a head in 1913. Chief Amodu Tijani, the Oluwa of Lagos (one of the Idejo white-caps), was the customary owner of Apapa — a malarial palm-bush peninsula across the harbour from the Marina. The colonial government wanted Apapa for a new deep-water port and railway terminus, and compulsorily acquired 225 acres under the Public Lands Acquisition Ordinance. The compensation offered was £75 (for 'use' of the land); Oluwa Amodu Tijani demanded full market value as owner. The case went through the colonial Supreme Court (loss), the Full Court (loss), and on appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.
On 11 July 1921, in *Amodu Tijani v Secretary, Southern Nigeria*, the Privy Council, speaking through Viscount Haldane, delivered the most consequential land-law judgment in Nigerian history. Haldane held that the Cession of 1861 had not extinguished native title; that the customary land tenure of Lagos was a substantive proprietary system that the British were bound to recognise; and that the Crown could acquire native land only by paying its full beneficial value to the customary owner, not a token use-fee. Amodu Tijani was awarded the equivalent of full freehold compensation for Apapa. More importantly, Haldane laid down a doctrine — now called the 'Amodu Tijani principle' — that has been cited in every common-law jurisdiction with indigenous land claims, from Australia (*Mabo*, 1992) to Canada (*Delgamuukw*, 1997) to Belize and Botswana.
For Lagos, the immediate effect was electric. Every Idejo House now had Privy Council backing to demand market compensation for any colonial acquisition, and the colonial government's reflex to treat the foreshore as Crown land was checked. Native title — the proposition that Lagos land had owners who pre-dated the British — was now enforceable English law. The descendants of Olofin's sons had, after sixty years of litigation, beaten the Crown. The principle they won would survive the colony, the regions, the First Republic and four military regimes. It would not survive 1978.