The Global Ijaw Atlas

Directory

Local government areas, clans and towns

Every local government area in which Ijaw communities are indigenous, with its headquarters, peoples, clans and principal towns. Open an entry to read it, or select it on the map.

Beyond Nigeria

The fishing coast and the modern diaspora

Ijaw fishers have followed the Gulf of Guinea for a century, and Ijaw professionals have followed oil and education across the world since independence. Each community is graded by how well it is documented.

Origins and history

How old is the Ijaw presence in the delta?

Older versions of this atlas spoke of a 7,000-year Nile-to-delta migration, of settlement dated to 800 BCE and of a 3,000-year-old capital at Agadagba-bou. The migration story is a popular reconstruction from S. K. Owonaro's 1949 history; the dates appear in no excavation report, and Agadagba-bou's excavated material is sixteenth-century. What the linguistics, archaeology and oral tradition actually support is set out below.

1. Deep time

   The Ijoid split

   Ijoid is one of the most divergent branches of Niger–Congo; some linguists treat it as a family of its own. Glottochronology, an unreliable method, has put its separation from its neighbours at 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. That is a statement about language, not a date for any settlement, and it points to a homeland in the West African forest zone, not the Nile.

2. c. 800 – 1100 CE

   The earliest excavated settlements

   Radiocarbon dates from Ke in Kalabari country and Okochiri on the Okrika mainland fall around AD 800 to 860, the oldest yet found in the delta. Of thirty-two dates from six sites in Nwanna Nzewunwa's 1980 synthesis, all but two lie in the second millennium. No excavation has produced a date before the Common Era.

3. c. 1000 – 1600

   Dispersal from the central delta

   Saikiripogu and Ewoama near Brass (AD 1000–1600), Isomabou in Ekpetiama (1030–1480), Onyoma at Nembe (1275–1845) and Agadagba-bou on the Igbedi creek (sixteenth century) match the oral traditions that trace most clans to movements out of the Wilberforce Island area toward the coasts and the western creeks.

4. 1470s – 1600s

   The coastal states form

   Portuguese ships reach Kula and the Rio Real in the 1470s. Bonny, Elem Kalabari, Nembe and Okrika grow from fishing villages into trading states; Okrika is a kingdom by the early seventeenth century, and Ogio rules Nembe around 1639.

5. 1650 – 1807

   The slave-trade century

   Bonny and New Calabar become the busiest embarkation ports of the Bight of Biafra, brokering roughly 1.5 million captives, most of them Igbo and Ibibio. The House (wari) system turns trading lineages into corporate war-canoe houses; Perekule of Bonny formalises it in the eighteenth century.

6. 1807 – 1884

   Palm oil and the middleman states

   Legitimate commerce, consular power at the bar, the Bonny civil war of 1869 and King Jaja's foundation of Opobo in 1870, and the Kalabari civil war of 1879–83 that founded Bakana, Abonnema and Buguma.

7. 1884 – 1960

   Protectorate and colony

   Treaties of Protection, the exile of Jaja (1887), King Koko's Akassa raid and the burning of Nembe (1895), the Mineral Oils Ordinance (1914), oil at Oloibiri (1956) and the Willink Commission (1958).

8. 1966 – today

   Minority politics and resource control

   Isaac Adaka Boro's twelve-day revolution (1966), the creation of Rivers (1967), Delta (1991) and Bayelsa (1996) States, the Ijaw National Congress (1991), the Kaiama Declaration (1998), the Odi massacre (1999) and the ceding of Bakassi (2008).