Akumazi

Akumazi is an Ika-Igbo community of four settlements whose own accounts of how they began do not agree; the tradition kept at its headquarters is that Onona and his wife Azi founded it.

Akumazi is an Ika-Igbo community in present-day Delta State, and its traditions give more than one account of where it came from. They are best read as separate memories rather than as one genealogy.

Akumazi-Umuocha is its principal settlement, and Owere-Olubor, Ekuoma and Ilabor grew up as the other three. The tradition kept at Akumazi-Umuocha is that Onona and his wife Azi founded the community and that the settlement took its name from her. The other settlements dispute it and keep origins of their own, and Ilabor is claimed both by Akumazi and by Igbodo. So Akumazi is a community formed by migration, settlement, intermarriage and the absorbing of families, not by one migration from one home.

It grew up in the Ika-Igbo world and became Igbo in language, institution and faith. Families of Igbo origin from Aniocha were absorbed into it; Igbo institutions and festivals took firm root, among them Ekwunsun and Ogbanigbe; and Igbo became the dominant speech through contact with the communities to the east. The cult of Ikenga, an Igbo institution, stands beside the older cult of Olokun, and Iwa-ji, the eating of the new yam, is kept in the year. Its powers are Ani, the earth; Ifejioku, of farming; Uzun or Idigun, of iron; and Olokun, of water, with the ancestors at the centre.

Its government centred on the Obi, but not on him alone. The community divides into settlements, and the settlements into idumu, lineages and families. At village level the administration is described as participatory, and at community level the settlements were represented; they were equals, and showed it by sharing kolanut and contributing together to communal affairs.

Its neighbours are Mbiri, Ute-Ogbeje, Umunede, Otolokpo, Igbodo, Obior and the other Ika and Aniocha-speaking settlements.