Aboh

Aboh is a riverine Igbo kingdom on the lower Niger in Ndokwa East, Delta State. It was made by two Igbo peoples meeting: the Akarai already living along the water, and Ika migrants from the Agbor country who came south and became its royal line, the Umudei.

The lower Niger was not empty when Aboh began. The Akarai were already there — fishermen, farmers, canoe builders and traders of the river, of the Nri and Awka country in their origins, with the Ofo, the omenala and titled leadership that go with it. They knew the water and its channels, and Aboh stands where they lived.

The second strand is Ika. A group of Ika Igbo came south out of the Agbor country during a period of war and succession trouble in the western Niger, led in the tradition by Obi Essumei Ukwu, and settled among the riverine communities. The two peoples married into each other, allied and merged, and the kingdom that came out of it was neither Agbor carried south nor the old fishing villages unchanged, but a new Igbo state on the water.

The royal line is called the Umudei, and the name is the link: it belongs to the ancient royal title Dein of Agbor, and in Ika a prince is Nwadei, while in Aboh Umudei means the children of the royal house. Four royal houses hold the succession in turn — Umu Ossai, Umu Ozegbe, Umu Ojugbali and Umu Ogwezi — which kept the monarchy from becoming one branch's property.

The Obi ruled, and did not rule alone. The Ofo stood for legitimate authority and the ancestral sanction behind it; the Ndiche and the titled men and lineage heads sat with the Obi over the affairs of the kingdom. Aboh is one of the clearest cases in Igboland of a centralised Igbo monarchy, and it was still a government of councils and custom rather than of one man.

Its position made it rich. Canoe-building, navigation, fishing, farming and riverine warfare were its trades, and the trade on the Niger from the delta up past Asaba was in its hands until the nineteenth century closed. The groups between the Orashi and the Sombreiro, Oguta and Izombe and Awarra and Egbema among them, are said once to have accepted its overlordship, and Meek records that in the travellers' accounts of the 1840s the ruler of Aboh claimed Onitsha among his territories.