Onitsha Town

Onicha Mmili, which the records call Onitsha, is the largest of the Onicha settlements and the one the Umu Eze Chima lineage is known by. It stands on the east bank of the Niger, and its Obi traces to Eze Chima through Oreze, his eldest son.

Onitsha is one of a family of towns that carry the name Onicha, and the family is what matters before the town is. They trace to Eze Chima, whose migration out of the west established the settlements the Umu Eze Chima are named for — among them Onicha-Ugbo on the western bank of the Niger and Onicha Mmili on the eastern one, which became the largest of them all.

The movement that made these towns is remembered as a return as much as a journey. Igbo people had gone west into the Benin country for opportunity, and in the displacements of the sixteenth century they came back east — which is why so many of the Onicha towns on the eastern side are older than the ones the return established, and why the name is found from Ebonyi to Imo to Enugu to Abia.

Onicha Mmili itself is where the lineage's political weight settled. Its Obi is the head of the Umu Eze Chima towns, its market was the greatest on the lower Niger, and its position on the river made it the meeting place of trade from the delta and the hinterland long before the Europeans came up the water.

The town is governed the way the Onicha towns are: the Obi with the Ndichie and the quarters around him, the Diokpa leading the family and village units, and the customary groups keeping order. Its identity is Igbo and Anioma at once — an Igbo town on the eastern bank whose people came from the western one, which is exactly what the name Onicha means: those who moved away from a main body to take up a new place.