The Ibo and Ibibio-Speaking Peoples of South-Eastern Nigeria

Western Africa Part III

Daryll Forde, G I Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315297712
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Routledge is proud to be re-issuing this landmark series in association with the International African Institute. The series, published between 1950 and 1977, brings together a wealth of previously un-co-ordinated material on the ethnic groupings and social conditions of African peoples.

Concise, critical and (for its time) accurate, the Ethnographic Survey contains sections as follows:

• Physical Environment
• Linguistic Data
• Demography
• History & Traditions of Origin
• Nomenclature
• Grouping
• Cultural Features: Religion, Witchcraft, Birth, Initiation, Burial
• Social & Political Organization: Kinship, Marriage, Inheritance, Slavery, Land Tenure, Warfare & Justice
• Economy & Trade
• Domestic Architecture

Each of the 50 volumes will be available to buy individually, and these are organized into regional sub-groups: East Central Africa, North-Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, West Central Africa, Western Africa, and Central Africa Belgian Congo.

The volumes are supplemented with maps, available to view on routledge.com or available as a pdf from the publishers.

IBO (IGBO)

Part I.
General

Tribal and Sub-Tribal Groupings and Demography

LOCATION

South-eastern Nigeria: Provinces of Onitsha, Owerri, Rivers (E.), Ogoja (W.), Benin (SE.), and Warri (NE.).

NOMENCLATURE

Before the advent of Europeans the Ibo had no common name and village groups were generally referred to by the name of a putative ancestral founder. The word Ibo has been used among the peoples themselves as a term of contempt by the Riverain Ibo (Oru) for their hinterland congeners. Meek suggests that the name may, like many African tribal titles, mean ‘the people’, embodying the Sudanic root -bo (or – po); it may also mean ‘slaves’, a title conferred possibly by the Igala, among whom the word for slave is onigbo (oni meaning ‘people’). Jeffreys considers that Ibo originally meant ‘forest-dwellers’, and, as a secondary or derived meaning, ‘slaves’. Its use by Europeans in the form Heebo or Ibo appears early in the slave trade to refer to any Ibo-speaking groups. It was also applied at first to the Ibibio who were later distinguished as ‘Kwa Ibo’ after the principal river in their country. To-day the name is used by the people primarily for the language, secondarily for Ibo-speaking groups other than one’s own, but with reference to oneself only when speaking to a European.¹

GROUPING

The Ibo are a single people in the sense that they speak a number of related dialects, occupy a continuous tract of territory and have many features of social structure and culture in common, but they were not formerly politically unified and there are marked dialectal and cultural differences among the various main groupings. Political authority was formerly widely dispersed among a large number of small territorial groups. For purposes of classification, groups of varying scale are here referred to as tribes, groups, and local communities according to their size and degree of social coherence, but the larger of these groups rarely had any centralized political institutions. The ‘tribes’, themselves composed of numerous small territorial units or local communities, may be aggregated into the following main regional divisions on the basis of general cultural similarity: the distinctive features of these main divisions are outlined in a series of later sections:

	Main Divisions^1	Location by Administrative Divisions^2	Approximate number of active adult males (1935–40)
I.	Northern or Onitsha Ibo
	(a) Western or Nri-Awka	Onitsha, Awka (ON)		115,400
	(b) Eastern or Elugu	Nsukka, Udi, Awgu (ON), Okigwi (OW)		213,000
	(c) Onitsha Town	Onitsha (ON)		7,000
			Total	335,400
II.	Southern or Owerri Ibo
	(a) Isu-Ama	Okigwi, Orlu, Owerri (OW)		167,600
	(b) Oratta-Ikwerri	Owerri (OW), Ahoada (R)		55,000
	(c) Ohuhu-Ngwa	Aba, Bende (OW)		62,300
	(d) Isu-Item	Bende, Okigwi (OW)		19,500
			Total	304,400
III.	Western Ibo
	(a) Northern Ika	Ogwashi Uku, Agbor (B)		33,000
	(b) Southern Ika or Kwale	Kwale (W)		19,500
	(c) Riverain	Ogwashi Uku (B), Onitsha (ON), Owerri (OW), Ahoada (R)		46,600
			Total	99,100
IV.	Eastern or Cross River Ibo
	(a) Ada (Edda)	Afikpo (OG)		20,300
	(b) Abam-Ohaffia	Bende, Okigwi (OW)		14,800
	(c) Aro	Aro (C)		1,800
			Total	36,900
V.	North-Eastern Ibo (Ogu Uku)
		Abakaliki, Afikpo (OG)		91,900
			Total	91,900
	Approximate total of active adult males for all divisions			867,700

DEMOGRAPHY³

Official estimates of total population are:

	1921	1931
Total for Nigeria	3,930,085	3,184,585
Northern Nigeria only	2,666	11,796

It should be noted that these figures are unreliable, particularly those for 1931, when, for administrative reasons, no attempt was made to take a complete census.

DENSITY OF POPULATION

Official provincial estimates per square mile were: Onitsha (1921) 306, (1931) 224; Owerri (1921) 268, (1931) 154. But much higher local densities have been estimated for parts of these provinces, e.g. estimates of 600-1,000 persons per square mile over much of Okigwi Division. Present data are not adequate to determine closely the areas that are densely populated, and such areas are often flanked or intersected by others of much lower density.

HISTORY AND TRADITIONS OF ORIGIN

The Ibo have no general or elaborate traditions of origin or migration. The traditions of migration of particular groups will be outlined in later sections. The power of the kingdom of Benin was probably felt among the Western and Southern Ibo by the fifteenth century; in the sixteenth century the Portuguese appear to have penetrated as far as Arochuku.

Bonny, which became one of the principal slave markets on the coast, was largely peopled by Ibo. In 1790, according to Adams,¹ 16,000 out of the 20,000 slaves sold there annually were Ibo. The last British slaver sailed from Bonny in 1808, though the trade continued till 1841. By 1846 the Rev. Hope Waddell reported that Bonny had become a flourishing centre of the palm-oil trade.

The first missions to be established in Ibo country were the C.M.S. at Onitsha in 1856 and Bishop Crowther’s at Bonny in 1864. Government schools were opened at Onitsha and Owerri in 1906. Meek estimated the total number of professing Christians in Iboland in the 1930s as not less than 600,000.

A trading station was opened at Onitsha in 1856 by Macgregor Laird, by the United African Company in 1879 and by the Royal Niger Company in 1886. The Oil Rivers Protectorate was established at Bonny in 1889 and later extended into the interior.

The Aro expeditionary force of 1901-2 brought under control what are now the Bende, Owerri and Aba Divisions, but civil authority was not finally established elsewhere until 1907. There were serious disturbances in 1914 in the Aba, Okigwi and Bende areas, but since then apart from the Aba ‘Women’s Riots’ of 1929 disorders have been slight and local.²

Language

Igbo is one of the Kwa languages. Numerous dialects are found reflecting the small scale of the territorial organization. There have been a few levelling factors at work in the past, such as the influence of Arochuku traders, the concentration of Ibo from all parts of the country in slave markets, as at Bende, Uzuakoli, Bonny and Akwete, and the social prestige of the town of Onitsha; but the most potent factor both in dialect levelling and in the establishment of a dominant dialect—a central political authority—has been lacking. With increased mobility following road construction and motor traffic, there is a tendency for Ibo outside their own district to modify their own speech by the suppression of strictly local usages.

Two Ib...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• FOREWORD
• CONTENTS
• IBO (IGBO)
• IBIBIO