Ndizuogu

Ndizuogu — Arondizuogu, Ndi Izuogu, Izuogu na Iheme — is the largest of the Aro settlements outside Arochukwu, made in the eighteenth century by the merchant Izuogu Mgbokpo and his associate Iheme. Its villages are spread across Ideato North, Okigwe and Onuimo in Imo State, and its two divisions are still Ndi Izuogu and Ndi Iheme.

Ndizuogu did not begin as a town that grew old. It began as a merchant's settlement, and it was made in the eighteenth century by Izuogu Mgbokpo, an Aro from Arochukwu who travelled the country toward Awka looking for trade and for captives. He came to Umualaoma, was received and sheltered there by a local associate, and then turned on the community that had taken him in: the tradition is a violent one, and it holds that his followers took the land by force, killed, and displaced or absorbed the people who were already on it. Whatever came after, that is how the settlement started.

He did not do it alone, and the clan is named for the two traditions rather than one. With Izuogu were his sons Uche and Awa, his brothers Imoko and Njoku, and Iheme — his principal servant and his ally, said to have come from Isi-Akpu Nise near Awka. The community that grew from them is Izuogu na Iheme, and the name Arondizuogu is the Aro who belong to Izuogu.

The two divisions are the frame the clan still understands itself by. Ndi Izuogu trace to Izuogu, his family and the first settlements around them — Awa, Uche, Njoku, Imoko, Amazu, Ejezie, Adimoha, Anyake, Uwaonu, Ucheagwu, Ndubisi and Ekwulu, with Awa-Izuogu, Ndiuche and Ejezie-Izuogu among the autonomous communities. Ndi Iheme trace to Iheme: Aniche, Onuoha, Eze, Okonkwo, Ogbuonyeoma, Akaeme, Ukwu and Akunwanta. They were never two separate peoples — they grew inside one political and economic system, and the pair of names is how that system is described.

What made Ndizuogu big was trade. It sat inside the Aro network that joined Arochukwu to markets across the south-east, and its merchants ran long distances with agricultural produce, manufactured goods and enslaved people. The wealth that came back built the merchant families, the fighting men and the institutions that gave the settlement its weight — and it rested on the capture, movement and sale of human beings, whose suffering the record of the settlement's growth should not be read past.

Its expansion was contested, and not only by force. Prolonged fighting with neighbouring communities was brought to an end, in the tradition, by Ezerioha Udensi of Obiokwara, Obinihu, Umualaoma, a patriarch of the host community, who worked out a peaceful allocation of land to the growing population of Ndizuogu — an arrangement that accepted what had happened and settled what would follow. So the territory was consolidated by negotiation and accommodation as well as by conquest.

The next phase belongs to Okoro Idozuka, born Okoli Idozuka, who came from Isi-Akpu Nise in the nineteenth century when Ndizuogu was already a centre of Aro commerce. He was a warrior, a merchant and a political leader at once, and he extended the land under the settlement's influence further than it had gone. His son Nwankwo Okoro went into the trade young, and after the British arrived he was among the local leaders taken into the colonial system as a warrant chief — the point at which a house built on kinship, wealth and war began to deal with an administration instead.

Colonial rule changed what the clan was. Authority that had been exercised through lineage, trade and fighting was rerouted through warrant chiefs and native courts, and the older Aro commercial and military system declined, especially after the campaigns against Arochukwu in the early twentieth century.

One thing about Ndizuogu is easy to miss: it is not a town. It is a spread of villages across Ideato North, Okigwe and Onuimo, each keeping its own identity and all of them keeping the wider one. Its people came from the descendants of Izuogu and Iheme, from other Igbo communities, from neighbouring populations brought in by war and marriage, and from the movement of trade — and some traditions hold that people taken as captives and brought into the community took the Izuogu name as their own. Izuogu na Iheme is still how the clan says itself.