Igbo people
Nation | Active
2637 BCE to 2215 CE
The Igbo people are an ethnic group native to the present-day south-central and southeastern Nigeria.
Geographically, the Igbo homeland is divided into two unequal sections by the Niger Rive –an eastern (which is the larger of the two) and a western section.
The Igbo people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Igbo language is divided into numerous regional dialects, and somewhat mutually intelligible with the larger "Igboid" cluster.
The Igbo homeland straddles the lower Niger River, east and south of the Edoid and Idomoid groups, and west of the Ibibioid (Cross River) cluster.
In rural Nigeria, Igbo people work mostly as craftsmen, farmers and traders.
The most important crop is the yam.[
Other staple crops include cassava and taro
The Igbos are also highly urbanized, with some of the largest metropolitan areas, cities and towns in Igboland being Onitsha, Enugu, Aba, Owerri, Orlu, Okigwe, Asaba, Awka, Nsukka, Nnewi, Umuahia, Abakaliki, Afikpo, Agbor and Arochukwu.
Before British colonial rule in the twentieth century, the Igbo are a politically fragmented group, with a number of centralized chiefdoms such as Nri, Arochukwu, Agbor and Onitsha.
Frederick Lugard introduces the Eze system of "Warrant Chiefs".
Unaffected by the Islamic jihad sweeping Nigeria in the nineteenth century, they become overwhelmingly Christian under colonization.
In the wake of decolonization, the Igbo develop a strong sense of ethnic identity.
During the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970 the Igbo territories secede as the short-lived Republic of Biafra.
MASSOB, a sectarian organization formed in 1999, continues a non-violent struggle for an independent Igbo state.
Small ethnic Igbo populations are found in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, as well as outside Africa.
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Dependencies are governed by members of the royal family, who are assigned several towns or villages scattered throughout the realm rather than a block of territory that can be used as a base for revolt against the oba.
As is evident from this brief survey, Yoruba and Benin history are interconnected.
In fact, areas to the west of Nigeria, in the modern Republic of Benin, are also closely associated with this history, both in the period before 1500 and afterward.
Igbo society, as argued by most scholars, was "stateless" and the Igbo region did not evolve centralized political institutions before the colonial period.
According to this theory, the relatively egalitarian Igbo lived in small, self-contained groups of villages organized according to a lineage system that did not allow social stratification.
An individual's fitness to govern is determined by his wisdom and his wisdom by his age and experience.
Subsistence farming is the dominant economic activity, and yams are the staple crop.
Land, obtained through inheritance, is the measure of wealth.
Handicrafts and commerce are well developed, and a relatively dense population characterizes the region.
Despite the absence of chiefs, some Igbo rely on an order of priests, chosen from outsiders on the northern fringe of Igboland, to ensure impartiality in settling disputes between communities.
Igbo gods, like those of the Yoruba, are numerous, but their relationship to one another and to human beings is essentially egalitarian, thereby reflecting Igbo society as a whole.
A number of oracles and local cults attract devotees, while the central deity, the earth mother and fertility figure, Ala, is venerated at shrines throughout Igboland.
The weakness of this theory of statelessness rests on the paucity of historical evidence of precolonial Igbo society.
There are huge lacunae between the archaeological finds of Igbo Ukwu, which reveal a rich material culture in the heart of the Igbo region in the eighth century CE and the oral traditions of the twentieth century.
In particular, the importance of the Nri Kingdom, which appears to have flourished before the seventeenth century, often is overlooked.
The Nri Kingdom is relatively small in geographical extent, but it is remembered as the cradle of Igbo culture.
Finally, Benin exercises considerable influence on the western Igbo, who adopt many of the political structures familiar to the Yoruba-Benin region.
The reason, primarily, is that another cleric, Al Kanemi, fashions a strong resistance that eventually forces those Fulani in Borno to retreat west and south.
In the end, Al Kanemi overthrows the centuries-old Sayfawa Dynasty of Borno and establishes his own lineage as the new ruling house.
The caliphate is a loose confederation of emirates that recognizes the suzerainty of the commander of the faithful, the sultan.
When Usman dan Fodio dies in 1817, he is succeeded by his son, Muhammad Bello.
A dispute between Bello and his uncle, Abdullahi, results in a nominal division of the caliphate into eastern and western divisions, although the supreme authority of Bello as caliph is upheld.
The division is institutionalized through the creation of a twin capital at Gwandu, which is responsible for the western emirates as far as modern Burkina Faso—formerly Upper Volta—and initially as far west as Massina in modern Mali.
As events turn out, the eastern emirates are more numerous and larger than the western ones, which reinforces the primacy of the caliph at Sokoto.
Nigeria keeps its important position in the slave trade throughout the great expansion of the transatlantic trade after the middle of the seventeenth century.
Slightly more slaves come from the Nigerian coast than from Angola in the eighteenth century, whereas in the nineteenth century perhaps thirty percent of all slaves sent across the Atlantic come from Nigeria.
Over the period of the whole trade, more than three and a half million slaves are shipped from Nigeria to the Americas.
Most of these slaves are Igbo and Yoruba, with significant concentrations of Hausa, Ibibio, and other ethnic groups.
In the eighteenth century, two polities—Oyo and the Aro confederacy—are responsible for most of the slaves exported from Nigeria.
The Aro confederacy will continue to export slaves through the 1830s, but most slaves in the nineteenth century are a product of the Yoruba civil wars that follow the collapse of Oyo in the 1820s.
Oyo's cavalry pushed southward along a natural break in the forests (known as the Benin Gap, that is, the opening in the forest where the savanna stretched to the Bight of Benin), and thereby gained access to the coastal ports.
Oyo experiences a series of power struggles and constitutional crises in the eighteenth century that directly relate to its success as a major slave exporter.
The powerful Oyo Mesi, the council of warlords that checks the king, force a number of kings to commit suicide.
In 1754 the head of the Oyo Mesi, basorun Gaha, seizes power, retaining a series of kings as puppets.
The rule of this military oligarchy is overcome in 1789, when King Abiodun successfully stages a countercoup and forces the suicide of Gaha.
Abiodun and his successors maintain the supremacy of the monarchy until the second decade of the nineteenth century, primarily because of the reliance of the king on a cavalry force that is independent of the Oyo Mesi.
This force is recruited largely from enslaved Muslims, especially Hausa, from farther north.
The other major slave-exporting state is a loose confederation under the leadership of the Aro, an Igbo clan of mixed Igbo and Ibibio origins, whose home is on the escarpment between the central Igbo districts and the Cross River.
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the Aro build a complex network of alliances and treaties with many of the Igbo clans.
They serve as arbiters in villages throughout Igboland, and their famous oracle at Arochukwu, located in a thickly wooded gorge, is widely regarded as a court of appeal for many kinds of disputes.
By custom the Aro are sacrosanct and are allowed to travel anywhere with their goods without fear of attack.
Alliances with certain Igbo clans who act as mercenaries for the Aro guarantee their safety.
As oracle priests, they also receive slaves in payment of fines or dedicated to the gods by their masters as scapegoats for their own transgressions.
These slaves thereby become the property of the Aro priests, who are at liberty to sell them.
Besides their religious influence, the Aro establish their ascendancy through a combination of commercial acumen and diplomatic skill.
Their commercial empire is based on a set of twenty-four-day fairs and periodic markets that dot the interior.
Resident Aro dominate these markets and collect slaves for export.
They have a virtual monopoly of the slave trade after the collapse of Oyo in the 1820s.
Villages suspected of violating treaties with the Aro are subject to devastating raids that not only produce slaves for export but also maintain Aro influence.
The Aro have treaties with the coastal ports—especially Calabar, Bonny, and Elem Kalabari—from which slaves are exported.
The people of Calabar are Efik, a subsection of Ibibio, whereas Bonny and Elem Kalabari are Ijaw towns.
The Ijaw, who occupy the tidal area in proximity to the Igbo, had wrested a frugal living from the sale of dried fish and sea salt to the inland communities for centuries before the rise of the slave trade.
Traditionally, they had lived in federated groups of villages with the head of the ranking village presiding over general assemblies attended by all the males.
During the heyday of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, the major Ijaw villages grow into cities of five thousand to ten thousand inhabitants ruled by local strongmen allied with the Aro.
Their economies are based on the facilities they offer to slave traders.
They are entrepreneurial communities, receiving slaves from the Aro for resale to European agents.
Personal wealth rather than status within a lineage group is the basis for political power and social status.
Government typically is conducted by councils composed of leading merchants and headed by an amanyanabo (chief executive), an office that in time becomes hereditary.
The area that is to become Nigeria is far from a unified country by the end of the eighteenth century.
Furthermore, the orientation of the north and the south is entirely different.
The savanna states of Hausaland and Borno have experienced a difficult century of political insecurity and ecological disaster but otherwise continue in a centuries-long tradition of slow political and economic change that is similar to other parts of the savanna.
The southern areas near the coast, by contrast, have been swept up in the transatlantic slave trade.
Political and economic change has been rapid and dramatic.
By 1800 Oyo governs much of southwestern Nigeria and neighboring parts of the modern Republic of Benin, whereas the Aro have consolidated southeastern Nigeria into a confederation that dominates that region.
The Oyo and the Aro confederations are major trading partners of the slave traders from Europe and North America.
Two unrelated developments that are to have a major influence on virtually all of the area that is now Nigeria ushers in a period of radical change in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
First, between 1804 and 1808, the Islamic holy war of Usman dan Fodio establishes the Sokoto Caliphate, which not only expands to become the largest empire in Africa since the fall of Songhai but also has a profound influence on much of Muslim Africa to the west and to the east.
Second, in 1807 Britain declares the transatlantic slave trade to be illegal, an action that occurs at a time when Britain is responsible for shipping more slaves to the Americas than any other country.
Although the transatlantic slave trade will not end until the 1860s, it is gradually replaced by other commodities, especially palm oil; the shift in trade has serious economic and political consequences in the interior, which leads to increasing British intervention in the affairs of Yorubaland and the Niger Delta.
The rise of the Sokoto Caliphate and the economic and political adjustment in the south strongly shape the course of the colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century.