Ikwerri

The seven are Elele, Isiokpo, Rumuji, Emohua, Allua and Igrita, Okpombu Tolu and Obia, and each is entered separately in this file with its own towns and figures. These groups feel no unity among themselves and vary considerably one from another, which is why the name is offered only as one possibility rather than as a settled entity.

Land is abundant here and labour comes in from the north, with most wealth drawn from palm kernels and oil, from food sold to the more crowded districts nearby, and from tolls charged to those crossing their country to trade or work further south. Yam farming is comparatively small because of heavy rainfall, and farms are worked by both men and women, the women growing cassava and cocoyams beside the yams.

Obia is singled out as culturally distinct from the other Ikwerri, keeping a five-day week and taking in Diobu, the native town of Port Harcourt, among its sixteen local communities.

Afigbo, who spells the name Ikwerre, puts the group in the same company as the Uratta, Etche, Asa and Ndoki and calls those five together the main body of what ethnographers know as the Southern Igbo. On his account the earliest Igbo to press south down the plateau spilled over into the lowland beneath it and multiplied there into just these groups, his argument being that they, like the Northern Igbo, have lost all memory of any migration from outside the region they now hold (Afigbo 1981, printed pp. 4, 8 and 10).

Where it is: Rivers State. Its own entry, and a community page on the Ikwerrians of Rivers State.