Umunri

Umunri is the name given to the group, printed jointly with Nri, its leading town. Its towns are Nri (Awguku), Enugu, Osunagidi and Nawfia.

The group says that it once made up a single clan with the communities of Umueri, with Nsugbe, Nadi and Umuanya and with Amanuke, under Nri's headship. Its seniority is contested: Oreri claims to have founded Nri and to rank above it, a claim Nri denies.

The town of Nri is the centre of a priestly cult concerned with installing chiefs, with purification and with the taking of titles. Priests and diviners from Nri travelled widely and carried both the cult and the title system with them, and in many settlements where a Nri cult took root the priest who brought it became the local Eze.

The group lies in the western uplands, the earliest cultural centre of the Northern Igbo, where the graded Ọzọ title system was elaborated before spreading southward to the Agulu and Isuofia areas. In these communities authority lay with senior Ọzọ title-holders.

Afigbo treats Nri as the name of a clan, not of one village, and sets out the tradition that Eri's eldest son Nri had four sons who founded Agukwu, Enugu-Ukwu, Nawfia and Enugu-Agidi — the group he calls the secondary segments, or Umunri. Agukwu, as the senior of the four, holds the great ọfọ of the Umunri clan and of the wider Umueri fraternity, and so is the ritual heart of the whole group. Afigbo also lists the services that carried Nri's name across Igboland: removing offences against the earth, installing the eze at Aguleri, tying the ankle cords at Ọzọ title-taking, and preparing the yam medicine for the year. Afigbo argues that colonial officers first attached the name Nri to the single town of Agukwu and that Forde & Jones then used Umunri and Nri interchangeably for a four-community clan; he holds that the clan, not the village, bears the name.

The Umueri account of the same body differs on a name and a parentage but not on the whole: in it the four Umunri towns left from Nri-Aka, in Ugume Umueri, the ground the first settlers are said to have occupied, which is also what the name Nri-aka recalls.