Abavo

Abavo is an Ika Igbo clan west of the Niger in Delta State, founded by Avo, who held the Igbo title of Eze. Its three divisions are Udomi, Igbogili and Azuowa, and its roots are in the Nri country rather than anywhere else.

Abavo is Ika and Igbo. The founder Forde & Jones give is Avo, and the title he bore was Eze — an Igbo royal and priestly title, which is itself the argument: a people founded from outside Igboland would not begin with an Igbo office. His descendants Udomi, Igbogili and Azuowa made up the clan's three main divisions, and they are the divisions still.

What is known of Abavo was for a long time what colonial intelligence reports said of it, and those reports reached for Benin to explain Ika communities — casting decentralised Igbo towns as satellites of a state they were never part of. The evidence does not support it. Northcote Thomas found in Abavo's speech what he called proto-Igbo archaic features, in its nasalisation and its incipient aspiration, which belong to early Igbo and are not Edoid at all. The title Obi, which the ruling line carried — Osaigbobu was an Obi of Abavo and the father of Jegbefume — has no meaning in the Edo languages and does in Igbo, and it was in use across eastern and western Igbo country, and in Nri-influenced places, before Benin's reach extended this far.

The account that fits the evidence is Onwuejeogwu's: Abavo was founded in the movement of Nri lineages into the Ika interior, out of Ute-Okpu and Issele-Uku, between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries and before Benin rose as a military power. Ogedengbe counts Abavo with Ogwashi-Uku, Okpanam, Owa and Igbuzo as communities carrying traditions of Nri origin, and Isichei held that Igbo-speaking people were in the Ika country first and met Benin later, through trade and war rather than as its children.

That is not to say nothing came from the west. Centuries of contact across the Niger left their mark, and a thin Edo layer sits on top of a much older Igbo foundation. What did not happen is what the old reports implied: Abavo was not founded by Benin and is not an offshoot of it. Its language, its titles, its kingship and its family system are Igbo, and its own people have always said so.