Oko Okwe

Oko and Okwe are two neighbouring Igbo communities of the western Niger in the Enuani country, each with its own account of itself.

Oko and Okwe are old communities of the western Niger in present-day Delta State, in the Enuani-Igbo country. They grew up along the river and its side waters, where farming, fishing, hunting and river trade kept the banks in steady contact.

Oko's own account begins with the people already on the ground: the Uwaile, also called Isi-Ani, whose title names their bond with the land. They held the farmland and the fishing grounds, and their authority was carried by the ọfọ eze, the Igbo emblem of ancestral right. The settlement that grew there was a joining of those people with families who came down the Niger from the north, remembered under the name Ajor-Oko; the incoming line came to hold the political administration while the Uwaile kept the ancestral and spiritual relation to the land. Oko's government is built on the Akor with titled elders and the communal institutions of the Enuani country, and the ọfọ remains its sign of rightful authority.

Okwe grew alongside Oko and by its own course. Its position on the water gave it fishing grounds, riverside farmland and the river routes, and its people formed among neighbours rather than out of one migration. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the river trade in farm produce and fish tied them into the wider commerce of the lower Niger.

Over the generations the two towns settled firmly into Enuani-Igbo language and institutions, and into the company of Asaba and the other river communities. Oko also remembers a quarrel that split it: a party of young men who disobeyed the elders over a ceremony were sent out, crossed the Niger and founded the Oko of Anambra State.