Otanchara

Its towns are Ihube, Okigwi, Ezinachi, Umuduru, Okwelli and Isiokpo. Five smaller local communities are mentioned but not named.

Several of its sections look elsewhere for kinship or association. The group claims Umunze of the Nri-Awka section as related to it; Okwelli is said to form part of Isu in the Southern Igbo Isuama group (No. 4); and Isiokpo would rather join with Nkalu of the Nri-Awka section (No. 27). The local communities of Otanchara and of Otanzu (No. 26) are intermingled.

The clan is counted in the southern uplands, among communities of slight outside contact and no title system, and in the broken country of the Imo river headwaters, where the higher ground is held by the Otanchara and Otanzu groups and some northern Isu villages of the Southern Igbo.

Afigbo writes as a man of Ihube in the Otanchara clan, and records that the manilla was in use there alongside the cowrie for years after British rule and that he himself used cowries in the 1940s. He also recalls the Ihube women who spun and dyed cotton into that decade, and the pre-British traders who told him the craft had once been more widespread still.

Against the currency and textile zones drawn by the ethnographer Jones, and against his claim that the Igbo did not spin or weave cotton outside Igala influence, Afigbo sets the evidence from Otanchara and Nsukka and calls those zones a rough working delimitation from unsystematic early data.