Anam

Anam is an old riverine Igbo community in Anambra State, made by several waves of migration rather than by one ancestor — which is what the name means: a gathering of people who came from different places and became one community.

Anam's name is not the name of a founder. It is what the people who gathered there came to be called, and the traditions say so: the first settlement was at Odah, in the country of what is now Umueze Anam, and the groups that came to it came from different places.

They came during the unsettled period remembered as the Adda War, when slave raiding and fighting drove people toward the safety of the Anam wetlands and the river forests. One of the first groups came from Nsugbe, crossing the Anambra river into the fertile country beyond it; among those early settlers was a hunter named Nwavor, remembered as a founder of the settlement. Others followed from Nteje, Aguleri, Umueri, Nando, Omasi, Anaku and the other river towns — some fleeing, some looking for land, some drawn by the fishing and the game. What drew them all was the same thing: good farmland, forest, water and plenty in it.

A smaller strand of Anam's ancestry runs to Idah. Ajida was a warrior of the Igala country, and one of his line reached Anam with his family after the movements the Igala remember as the Apa War, found land and settlements already there, stayed, and was absorbed into the growing community. Other descendants of the same line settled elsewhere. That accounts for an element within Anam; it does not account for Anam, and most of the traditions point to the Igbo communities of the Anambra and Niger rivers.

Until the end of the nineteenth century none of this was written down, and what is known comes from what elders kept and passed on — which is why villages sometimes remember the same events differently, and why the differences are reported here rather than smoothed away. Anam is a riverine Igbo community of the Oru country: fishing, farming the floodland, and the water that made it.