By Chijioke Ngobili
The first ever native court to be established by the British in Ìgbòland east of the Niger was in Ọnịcha. It was in 1900. For years after that, Nnewi, Ogidi, Obosi, Mkpọọ, Ọba and all those other signpost towns attended the court at Ọnịcha, including as far as Ihiala.
The records of court sittings with representatives from these towns as early as 1900, 1901 are still in available.
There was the other court in Asaba which served for the Ìgbòland west of the Niger and which had been erected and used earlier in the late 19th century by the Royal Niger Company people for settling various disputes. Those were the two earliest native courts in the Ìgbò experience of British judicial system.
As the Ọnịcha Hinterland Expedition happened and advanced from 1904 and ended in 1905, other courts were erected mostly from 1906, and with that came the scramble for warrants by the “new men” of these other towns who had seen how the British ‘respected’ and deferred to the Ọnịcha monarchy and were eager to replicate it in their towns to join the “new” era. Do not forget that the goings and comings from and to Ọnịcha have been happening from 1890s when the missionaries began to penetrate the Hinterland.
In Ogidi, for example, Walter Amobi who got the warrant to represent ndị Ogidi in Ọnịcha Native Court did not waste time to introduce “igba Ofala”, “tee umatu”, “inye ụkwụ na nlọ” etc (practices he learned in Ọnịcha) in Ogidi when he conned the people to surrender sovereignty to him to evade the 1904 British bombardment of communities in the name of expedition. Amobi introduced such Ọnịcha titles as “Onowu”, “Iyasere” which now exist in what they call Igwe’s cabinet today but which have no root in Ìgbò language because Ọnịcha copied them from Bini. In fact, Amobi once answered Obi Amobi in imitation of Obi Okosi II of Ọnịcha who was the person in power at the time. Nnewi’s Josiah Orizu was once referred to as Obi Nnewi even up till the 1950s or so. But there are hardly traces that Nnewi people referred to one man as “Obi Nnewi” or “Eze Nnewi” before 1904 when Nnewi surrended to the British via Ézè Ụgbọnyamba who got the first warrant from the British soldiers.
These nearby towns copied a lot of things from Ọnịcha for various political reasons that were understandable. The problem is that these things that were copied were later claimed as indigenous by certain interest groups in order to retain power and influence as the colonial experience got more complex and complicated with the introduction of the new social and economic systems whose keys were held by the missions and their educational systems.
The word “Ọfala” has no Ìgbò linguistic root or meaning yet it was a practice Ọnịcha monarchy copied from Bini and which others copied from Ọnịcha during this period to consolidate their political legitimacy in one family or one lineage. Every goat and hen now celebrate annual Ọfala but no one can find it in Ìgbò language, just as Christmas.
I insist that evidence of claims be investigated from our language because a thing can never exist without existing in a language reference. If you claim your town was a precolonial monarchy, what was “monarchy” called in Ìgbò language and/or in your dialect? If you claim you had a “throne” before the British arrived to recognize and give warrant to someone, where is that throne or its artifact? How old was it at the time and where can we find traces of it in your community’s memory and folklores just as you can find among the non-Igbo areas that really practiced monarchy?
It was somewhat shameful reading Akwaeke Nwafo Orizu referring to Nnewi as “Nnewi kingdom” in his book, Without Bitterness just to align it to Ọnịcha. Yet no human being referred to as “king” ever had the “dominion” over the entire Nnewi air and land space to qualify it as the “dominion of the king” (kingdom). Sadly, Nwafo Orizu was educated enough at the time he wrote the book to understand what the word “kingdom” implies and knew very well that it had no place among a democratic-republican people who owned and shared lands equitably for centuries when many of their neighbors across West Africa had no lands of their own. The features that distinguished us as a remarkable were abandoned for cheap, populist ones that ended up make us a laughingstock because they were not what our ancestors evolved.
Chijioke NGOBILI…
