Lejja

Lejja is a town of thirty-three villages in Nsukka, Enugu State, on the edge of the Benue plateau. It is the Onyishi Omabe — the chief of the Omabe group — and its iron smelting is among the earliest anywhere in Africa.

Lejja stands where the Nsukka plateau falls away to the Benue plain, on laterite and basalt. That geology is why the town matters: iron was smelted here from around 2000 BC and the work went on until the fifteenth century AD, which makes Lejja one of the earliest iron-working sites in sub-Saharan Africa and the best evidence there is for where the craft began in this part of the world.

The proof is still in the ground. At Otobo Ugwu square in Dunoka village there are more than eight hundred cylindrical slag blocks, each weighing between thirty-four and fifty-seven kilograms — the waste of furnaces that ran hot enough to melt the ore and drain the slag into collecting pits. Around the square and across thirteen villages, sixteen sites have been surveyed: places where iron was smelted, places where people lived, and places where they sacrificed.

The rite at that square is part of the same history. The religious customs kept around the slag blocks are tied to the smelting itself, and they carry the town's law, its medicine and its relations between men and women — which is why the site is treated as a monument and not only as an archaeological one.

The town is thirty-three villages in three regions — Ejuona, Uwani and Ekaibute — and those fall into two political zones. Dunoka, Amaowoko and Obka are among the villages.