Amai

Amai is a Ukwuani-Igbo community of five quarters in Ndokwa land, whose people remember coming into the Ndokwa hinterland by way of Aboh.

Amai is a Ukwuani-speaking community in Ndokwa land, Delta State, in the hinterland of the Niger Delta. Obiaruku lies to its north, Eziokpor to its east, Aragba, Orogun and Umuebu to its west, and Ogume and Ezionum to its south.

Its own account of where it came from is a movement out of the east and the north-west of the region: the ancestors are remembered as passing through Aboh, the Igbo kingdom on the lower Niger, and going west into Ndokwa, with Amai taking shape around the fifteenth century. It belongs to the wider movement of Igbo-speaking people along the Niger, and Aboh and the riverine towns about it were among the places they set out from.

Amai is organised in five quarters — Amage-Amai, Umueku, Umubu, Ishikaghuma and Umuosele — each tracing descent to the founding population, and the kingship rotates among them. Power never rested with the ruler alone: lineages, elders, titled men and the community assembly had their part.

It was an early administrative centre of Ndokwa, and local accounts say it was the first district headquarters of the area, serving Kwale, Abbi, Ogume, Obiaruku, Umutu and Ebedei. On 22 October 1896 the community concluded an agreement with the British authorities in the train of Ralph F. Locke's expedition, and the account of it describes a large, well-ordered community with kolanut, coconut and oil palm of real commercial promise.

Farming and local trade carried the economy, and the oil palms and kolanut trees tied Amai to the commerce of the Niger Delta and western Igboland. Its old religion bound it to its ancestors and to the forces of the land; Christianity is now the faith of most of its people, with the older practice surviving in the heritage, and it also has a Muslim population and has been called an important centre of Islam in Ndokwa.