Umunede

Umunede is an Ika-Igbo kingdom of Ika North East, traced to Ede and Iye, and one of the major towns of Ika land.

Umunede is an Igbo kingdom of the Ika in Ika North East local government area of Delta State, west of the Niger. It is counted among the major Ika-Igbo towns, with Agbor, Owa, Ute-Okpu, Ute-Ogbeje, Igbodo, Mbiri, Akumazi and Otolokpo, and has long been a farming and trading centre.

It stands on high ground on the Benin–Asaba road. Akumazi and Ekwuoma lie to its east, Agbor and Emuhu to its west, Mbiri to its north, Igbodo to its north-east and Owa and Otolokpo to its south, a position that has made it a meeting point for farmers, traders and travellers moving between the Ika towns.

Its own account traces the town to an ancestor named Ede, and a local history dates the founding to about 1255 and names Ede and Iye together as its founders. The name is read as Umu Ede, the children of Ede. Their descendants are linked to the town's four divisions — Ileje, Obi, Oba and Ile — and it is recorded with four ogbe: Ogbe Obi, Idumuilege, Idumugba and Idumuile. The Idumu prefix in three of them is the usual Igbo mark of a lineage group that grew into a village, and authority runs through the umunna, the quarters, the villages, the elders, the title-holders and the community assembly.

Its ruler was the Eze, the Igbo title, until 1919, when Eze Onyeagwu received a royal Ada from Oba Eweka II of Benin, and the adoption of the Obi title is linked to that. The throne is held by Ezeagwu Ezenwali I, who succeeded his father in 1993 and is counted the seventeenth Obi.

The town had its own religious institutions long before Christianity: about fourteen okpukpu are recorded, which tells how central priests and lineage religious roles were. Yam, cassava and maize are its crops, and its place on the Benin–Asaba corridor has made it a collecting point for farm produce going on to other parts of Nigeria; commerce and news moved through the town crier, hawking and the markets, and music carried news and promoted trade.

The Ika are an Igbo subgroup with their own dialect, and Umunede is Igbo in everything that makes a community — its kingship, its communal organisation, its marriage customs and its oral history.