Enugu-Ezike

Enugu-Ezike is the Igbo town that fills Igbo Eze North in Enugu State, traced in its own account to Ezike Oba, and governed by its eldest men.

Enugu-Ezike is a large town covering the whole of Igbo Eze North local government area of Enugu State, and the headquarters of it. Benue State lies to its north, Ovoko, Amala and Obollo-Afor to its south, and Kogi State to its west. Its people are Igbo.

The town is counted in four districts — Essodo, Ezzodo, Itodo and Ozzi — and thirty-three villages. In Essodo: Aguibeje, Amube, Ogbodu, Okata and Ufodo. In Ezzodo: Aji, Inyi, Owerre Eze, Uda-Enugu-Ezike, Umuagada, Umuogbo Agu, Umuogbo Ulo and Umuogbo Uno. In Itodo: Amachalla, Amufie, Igbele, Ikpuiga, Imufu, Isugwu, Olido, Umuida and Uroshi. In Ozzi: Amaja, Ekposhi, Ezillo, Igogoro, Ikpamodo, Nkpamute, Ogrute, Okpo, Onicha-Enugu, Umuogbo Ekposhi and Umuopu.

Its own account of itself runs back to Ezike Oba, an ancestral figure remembered as having come from the Nri kingdom, driven by conflict, by pressure of people and by the search for good land.

It is governed by age rather than by a king: the Onyishi, the eldest man of the town, heads a gerontocracy, and the office of Eze is a later and lesser thing. In Afigbo's account Ezeke, a son of the Atama of Amube, was taken in a slave raid and escaped home, and his son Ezodo took the ama title, went to Idah for a horse, a red fez and a red gown, and was anointed by his own grandfather — an office that carried little power and had long been vacant when the British came. The Ezership of these towns is also held to have come from Nri with a cult of its own and to have been gradually secularised by its neighbours; Afigbo reads the version coloured by the Idah story as a later attempt to present a local Igbo title as a gift from outside, and rejects the colonial claim that northern Nsukka was conquered and administered from Idah.