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The Custodians · A story of land and trust
For centuries, Nigeria's kingdoms and family heads held land in trust for their people. This is how that trust was built, in earth, brick and law, and how we keep it today.
Seven chapters · about a minute
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Around Benin City, the Edo people dug the Iya: moats with earth ramparts raised beside them. Built community by community over centuries, the network is estimated at 16,000 km. Guinness World Records lists it as the longest earthworks of the pre-mechanical era.
The inner city Iya, about 12 km long, was dug around 1460.
Under Benin custom, land was held for the community, and only the Oba could grant its ownership.
Kano's walls were begun under Sarki Gijimasu, who reigned from 1095 to 1134, and completed in the 14th century. Fifteen gates led into the city.
Inside stands Gidan Rumfa, built in the late 15th century and still the Emir's home: about 13 hectares of courtyards, council rooms and quarters, raised in tubali, sun-dried mud brick.
Look at the roofline. Those rising points are zanko. Keep them in mind; they return at the end.
In Ife's golden age, between about 1200 and 1400, streets and courtyards were paved with fragments of broken pottery: urban design, laid by hand.
Yoruba families lived in the agbo ilé, a compound of rooms built around open courtyards and named after its founding family head.
The compound belonged to the family as a whole, never to one person in it.
In an Igbo compound, the obi was the most important building: the meeting house of the family head, where guests were received and family affairs were discussed.
It held the family's ancestral shrine, and it passed from the head to his first son. In parts of Owerri it stands at the compound's entrance, the first door a visitor meets.
The family head managed its land for every member, and the obi was his seat.
In the 19th century, and especially after Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, formerly enslaved people and merchants returned from Bahia to Lagos.
The returnees, known as Agudás, built two-storey sobrado houses with arched doors, tall shuttered windows and carved plaster, blending Brazilian, European and African ideas.
Many are gone. The Ilojo Bar, a national monument, was demolished in 2016. What isn't recorded can be lost.
In 1921 the Privy Council summed up customary tenure in one line: “Land belongs to the community, the village or the family, never to the individual.”
On 29 March 1978 the Land Use Act vested all land in each state in its Governor, “held in trust and administered for the use and common benefit of all Nigerians.” A right to land is now evidenced by a Certificate of Occupancy.
The keeper changed. The idea of trust did not.
Today the paperwork matters, but papers can be forged and listings can be fake, and the risk is highest when you are buying from abroad.
So we do what the custodians did: we stand on the land. Every property on Monarch is checked against its documents, inspected in person and published with a date.
The crown kept the land in trust. We make trust something you can check.
Dates for early earthworks and buildings are estimates from archaeology and oral chronicles. Customary land practice varied between communities; this is a general history, not legal advice.
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From our founder
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