Nike

Nike is the Igbo community north of Enugu in Enugu East, whose own tradition makes Anike a child of the god Awuwa and Ugwunye, and whose villages are under an Igwe.

Nike is a community in Enugu East local government area of Enugu State, one of the largest parts of the state, bordering Nsukka, Ebonyi and Enugu North. It is made up of twenty-four villages under the Igwe of Nike.

Its tradition of its own beginning is kept as the story of one mother. Ugwunye, married to the god Awuwa, bore Anike at Nike; she left Awuwa and married Ukwu and bore Egede, then married Eze Achala Ukwu and bore Affa at Ikolo. Anike, the child of Awuwa and Ugwunye, married Aho-Ojoma, a god, at Nokpa, and had eleven children, of whom Ibagwa was the eldest.

The Ogui Nike are a part of the community with a different memory: they are remembered as descendants of people who left a village of the Udi plateau, moving from Akegbe to Ugwueke, and who came to Nike's help in its war with Okpatu.

Nike is sparsely peopled, some fifty square miles at under fifty persons to the square mile, and its farming is quite exceptional, with nothing but kitchen gardens cultivated and no climbing of palms, so that land was of little worth and questions of tenure did not arise. Yet the Nike area is counted among the few where good land and a thin population made it worth growing yams for sale outside the district.

Afigbo describes Nike and the Aro as entering a blood pact covering trade, war and culture, with the Nike–Aro combination acting as middlemen between the Aro and the divided Nsukka communities. They came to control the slave fairs at Ibagwa Nkwo and Nkalagu, and Afigbo makes their push into the highlands one reason the Igala power there declined.