Aiyetoro

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Aiyetoro (Yoruba, ‘happy city’). A utopian Christian community, the Holy Apostles, in Nigeria, founded by a group of persecuted members of the aladura-type Cherubim and Seraphim society. In 1947 they migrated to a mudbank in the coastal lagoons 160 miles east of Lagos, built a model town on piles, and set up a radical form of economic communism under a priest-chief. Several branch communities developed, but by the 1970s internal dissension and litigation had appeared and the original impetus had faded.