Umuakasiada

Umuakasiada is the Akashiada group of Ukwuani clans in Delta State: Eziokpor, Ezionum and Umuebu, with Obiaruku grown out of Umuebu land. Their own account of where they came from is an Igbo one — migration out of eastern Igboland by way of the western Igbo towns of Asaba, Ebu, Utchi and Afor — and the older story that traces them to Benin is rejected by the researchers who have worked on it.

The Akashiada are Eziokpor, Ezionum and Umuebu, and Obiaruku grew out of Umuebu's land beside the Ethiope. The clans share the customs and the speech of the Ukwuani country, and their own researchers treat them as the most recent arrivals in it — coming in from the late sixteenth century into the seventeenth, with Obiaruku settled only at the end of the nineteenth.

Their ancestry is Igbo. The account that traces the Akashiada to Benin does not survive the evidence: the clans bear Igbo names, they keep Igbo customs, and the verifiable traditions point the other way — migration out of eastern Igboland and through the western Igbo towns of Asaba, Ebu, Utchi and Afor, which are named again and again as the places the migrations started from. The first settlement in the new country was Umuoshi quarter in Eziokpor, and the later villages grew from there.

Obiaruku is the largest town in Ukwuani land and the headquarters of its local government. It began as Mokka's farm settlement on the Ethiope, and it is remembered that he left Umuebu about 1880 to keep watch on the approach to his own clan as much as to farm. Others came after him — the Awkuzu quarter, whose ancestors are said to have gone from Awkuzu in eastern Igboland to Aboh and then to Umuebu before moving again — and the Ogwezi who followed them from Aboh and founded Umundede quarter.

The river is what made the place. The Ethiope's banks carried the timber and the rubber the Royal Niger Company came for, and the trade turned a farm settlement into the administrative centre of the district.