Ogume

Ogume is an old Ukwuani-Igbo community of Ndokwa, made by waves of Igbo-speaking settlement rather than by one founding ancestor, and governed by seniority rather than by a king.

Ogume is one of the old communities of Ukwuani, in Ndokwa country in present-day Delta State, and belongs to the Igbo-speaking peoples west of the Niger.

No single migration made it. People came in waves; related Igbo-speaking communities spread outward, settlers took up new farmland, families intermarried and newcomers were absorbed. Each of its quarters keeps its own memory of where it came from, and the tradition of Ogbagwu Quarter runs back to Aboh. Ukwuani belongs to the Igbo family of languages, and Ogume's institutions, names, customs and religion keep their ties to the Igbo world.

It was never built around an absolute hereditary king. The Okpala-Uku is its senior authority, standing for ancestral seniority; the Onotu-Uku organises and carries out communal decisions; the Osele-Uku keeps its traditional and spiritual institutions. The Otu, the age-grade system, runs through the community: younger adult grades did the physical work and the defence, and older grades moved into advice and judgement. Authority was spread across elders, lineage heads, age grades and the communal institutions, not held by one person.

The Nduku Ogume festival falls near the end of the farming year and is tied to the harvest. It is more than a celebration: through song, performance, storytelling and open comment the community looks back over how people behaved in the year, and misconduct and anything that harmed the community can be answered for in public, which makes it a form of moral teaching and reconciliation as much as of entertainment.

Farming has always been at the heart of it — yam, cassava and palm produce, with the farming year fitted to the social and religious calendar and the land understood as ancestral as well as economic. Umuchime is one of the communities associated with Ogume, its name the usual Igbo Umu plus ancestor: the descendants of Chime.