The town is called Bekita, or Abekita. It was a 19th Century settlement in the Waterworks country of Westmoreland, Jamaica, formed by a group of Yoruba slave descendants who were called Nagos. According to Prof. Wole Soyinka in the book ‘You must set foot at dawn’, Bekuta is the corrupted name of the city of Abeokuta in Nigeria. The place was named Abeokuta by slaves because of its rockhills served to remind settlers of home, and one of the hills is said to share semblance, especially in its size with that of Olumo.
In the year 1990 when Prof. Wole Soyinka visited the dying town, he met an old woman who narrated the story of how generations had preserved the tradition from homeland in Africa. The single old woman who kept the village alive had died by soyinka’s second visit and so was Bekuta itself. The 13 acre Abeokuta Natural Park, having one of Jamaica’s oldest swimming pools and surrounded by a lush flora, was commissioned by the Nigerian High Commissioner on this site in 2003. Similar settlements are to be found in the northerly Hannover Parish, peopled by a Yoruba speaking group who identified themselves as Ettu in reference to their traditional reverence to ancestors, which like the people of Bekuta contrasts curiously with Orisha worship of the Yoruba.
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