Okposi

Okposi is a town of Ebonyi State in Ohaozara, and one of the two salt towns of the eastern Igbo. Enechi Akuma founded it, and its eight broad divisions — Okposi ezi nasato — are still how the town counts itself.

Enechi Akuma is the founder, and the town began at Egu Okpuhu Ukpo before moving to Avu, where he lived and died. The eight broad divisions of Okposi were founded by his sons, and they are what Okposi ezi nasato — the eight houses of Okposi — means. Smaller villages merge into them, and a man's standing in the town is reckoned through which one he belongs to.

The salt is the town's other name. Two hunters, Ekuma Chita and Uta Ano, found the lakes, and from then the women of Okposi made salt and the men farmed yam, which is the division of labour the town kept for generations. The brine here is the saltiest in the south-east, and the salt scarcity after the war made every family in Okposi comfortable. Okposi and Uburu are the two salt towns of the eastern Igbo, and their rivalry is as old as the trade.

The town had no king. Government was the mass meeting: Okwu-Okposi, held at the Eke Okposi market before the shrine of Ani-oha, where the eight flat stones laid for the eight divisions stand in order of seniority and every adult man could speak. Above the villages sat the Oviri-Uke, the council of elders, and below them the Uke-Ogonogo, the selected middle-aged men who enforced what the meeting decided. The district officer who saw it working called Okposi a republic in the true sense of the word.

The last month of the year, Onwa Aju, belongs to the ancestors: every man whose parents have died slaughters at least a goat, and the priest who keeps the rite brings back the year's programme from the meeting he attends with them. The title that matters most here is earned by yam: Ikwa Odju, which makes a man an Onyiba, and it was expensive long before the currency changed.