Ozikorosection in the archive
Onicha
Recorded in Delta. A place page gathers every related history, image, recording and document rather than opening only one article.
Connected writing
Histories about Onicha
The archive links no published history to Onicha yet. Its neighbours’ histories are not shown here, because a link to another community is not a history of this one.
Named in other records
Histories that mention Onicha
These are published records whose own words name Onicha. A mention is not a history of Onicha, which is why they are listed here rather than with the histories about it.
Read as: Onicha. Counted where the name is written with a capital, because a lower-case occurrence of a name that is also an ordinary word is the word. Showing the 48 most recent of 51 records that name it.
The record
What the archive holds for Onicha
| Region | Delta |
|---|---|
| State | Delta, Anambra |
| Local government | Aniocha North, Aniocha South, Oshimili North, Oshimili South, Onitsha North |
| Division | Western Igbo |
| Ethnic group | Igbo |
| Recorded as | section |
Onicha is a section of the west Niger Igbo: the family of towns whose names carry the word — Onicha-Olona, Onicha-Ugbo, Onicha-Ukwu and Onicha Mmili across the river — which belong together by descent and by the Ezechime tradition.
Onicha is not one town. It is the set of towns that carry the name, and what holds them together is the tradition that they came out of the same movement: Ezechime, Onicha his eldest son, and the dispersal that put Onicha-Ugbo and Onicha-Olona and Onicha-Ukwu on the west bank and Onicha Mmili on the east.
The word describes the people it named. Onicha is read as those who moved away from a main body to take up a new place — a name for a settlement made by leaving, which is what every town that carries it did.
Onicha-Ugbo is the ancestral home on the western side and the head of the group; Onicha-Olona was founded by people who moved from it; Onicha-Ukwu stands with them. Onicha Mmili, Onicha Ado, is the largest of them all — across the Niger in Anambra State, founded when Oreze, Ezechime's eldest, crossed the river. It is the Onitsha whose Obi traces to him.
The towns are governed the way Enuani towns are. The Diokpa, the oldest man of a family or a village, leads it; the Onotu and the customary groups around him keep order and see to the defence of the town. Farming is the base of the west-bank towns, with yam at the centre of it, and Onicha-Ugbo's market is as old as the town.
Sources
Forde & Jones (1950), The Ibo and Ibibio-Speaking Peoples of South-Eastern Nigeria, Table VII and notes
Archive records
Photographs, oral testimony and documents connected to this community would appear here with provenance.
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