Ozikorotown in the archive
Asaba
Recorded in Anambra. A place page gathers every related history, image, recording and document rather than opening only one article.
Connected writing
Histories about Asaba
The archive links no published history to Asaba yet. Its neighbours’ histories are not shown here, because a link to another community is not a history of this one.
Named in other records
Histories that mention Asaba
These are published records whose own words name Asaba. A mention is not a history of Asaba, which is why they are listed here rather than with the histories about it.
Read as: Asaba. Counted where the name is written with a capital, because a lower-case occurrence of a name that is also an ordinary word is the word. Showing the 48 most recent of 59 records that name it.
The record
What the archive holds for Asaba
| Region | Anambra |
|---|---|
| State | Anambra |
| Division | Riverine Igbo |
| Ethnic group | Igbo |
| Recorded as | town |
Aboh's control of the lower Niger reached as far as Asaba.
Its people came from Achalla and from Nteje, both of them Northern Igbo groups.
Aboh's power on the lower Niger reached upstream as far as Asaba, and Aboh controlled trade on the river from Ijaw country to that point until the nineteenth century came to an end.
Afigbo gives the fuller history of the town's role: the United African Company set up a trading post at Asaba in 1881-83 by treaty with its chiefs, and used it as a base for penetrating the West Niger Igbo, which provoked the Ekumeku secret organisation of the young men's leagues of the village-groups. The Company took the field against them in 1898; there was further fighting in 1902 and 1909, and the movement was finally broken by prosecutions, the Unlawful Societies Proclamation of 1905 and collective punishment. Under the reorganisation of 1914 the West Niger Igbo were given two divisions, Aboh under Warri and Asaba under Benin.
Sources
Forde & Jones (1950), The Ibo and Ibibio-Speaking Peoples of South-Eastern Nigeria, pp. 49-51, Table IX, notes and Distinctive Features; Meek (1937), Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, p. 15; Afigbo (1981), Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture, pp. 296-298 and 309-311
Archive records
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