Equiano On Igbo Warfare (2)

By

A E Afigbo Department of History and International Relations Eboyi State University –

There is perhaps little doubt that Olaudah Equiano’s auto-biography, The Interesting Narrative,1 was conceived, written, published and distributed as a work of propaganda against the slave trade under which the author had suffered grievously but which he survived, he claimed, because “God is my Salvation,” and which trade at the time was becoming bad news in Western Europe. In the letter with which he forwarded copies of the book to the British Parliament he had made it clear that “the chief design” of the work was “to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen. By the horrors of that trade was I first torn from all the tender connections that were naturally dear to my heart…”2

There is also little doubt that the author was a gifted propagandist as seen, among other things, in the fact that he recognized the need to give his story an enhanced veneer of verisimilitude by situating it in as many relevant contexts as he could command. The first set of contexts dealt with the period of his life before he was swept into the hated cesspool of slavery. These contexts were his village (Essaka); his nation (the Igbo nation), the, at the time much famed and romanticized, Benin Empire; the West African Region which at the time was the leading source of the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean and across the Sahara Desert, and finally the little known African continent whose maps Swift’s geographers studded with images of elephants and giraffes for ‘want’ of towns!

The afore-mentioned contexts formed four concentric rings and carried the foundation of the great literary edifice he erected to remind contemporaries and posterity of, as well as shock them with, the horrors of the slave trade. The first chapter of the book is devoted to a “comprehensive” ethnography of the two inner rings – Essaka and – a very ambitious project if ever there was one. The focus of this paper is on a very small fragment of this ethnography – a fragment that may be said to deal with Igbo warfare in the eighteenth century in some two pages and a third3. It is debatable indeed whether it could be said that Equiano wrote on ‘Igbo warfare’. What he did, to be precise, was to give an account of what he called ‘a battle’ between his community and a rival ‘nameless’ community which he said took place in one of their farmlands and which he said he had had the opportunity to watch from the top of a tree at a safe distance. According to him the battle was the result of a surprise and unprovoked attack on his community by the rival community. Thus on the side of his community there had been no specific preparation for the battle, while on the other side the story was different. They had chosen their time and place. They had prepared and attacked. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, one battle does not constitute a war.

However, after the necessarily brief description of the battle he was privileged to watch, Equiano went on to make some general statements about such encounters. In the process he touched upon their causes, the fact of their frequent and regular occurrence, the fact that Igbo communities were always on the alert and ready for war, the fact that each community consisted of a standing militia and the fact that in war was not just for men but also for women - that is was gender- neutral. He also gave a list of Igbo weapons of war. To this extent it could be said that Equiano wrote on Igbo warfare through the back door.

Be that as it may, Equiano’s very sketchy account now carries with it an importance, which is probably out of all proportion to its real historical value and that for one obvious reason. In the millennia before 1900 it is the only such account of Igbo warfare written from inside knowledge that is by one who not only described what he saw or heard or both but also was part of the happening. Without doubt a number of European visitors to the Bight of during the era of the slave trade have left us some tantalizing comments on the Igbo and on ‘war’ amongst them. John Grazilhier (1699), for instance, talked of “the Hackbous Blacks, a people much addicted to war and preying on their neighbours”4. Similarly Hermann Koler (1840) referred to what he called the “warlike nature” of the Igbo which he identified as one of the things about them that “makes a significant impact on their neighbours”.At another point he reported that the Igbo “are warlike, wild and rapacious” and that some of them “are cannibals”5.

These statements were all based on hearsay since until very late in the nineteenth century hardly any European went into Igboland to explore it in any formal or significant manner. On this the scholar-administrator, Harry H. Johnston wrote in 1888 as follows: “For about three centuries we have hung about the coasts, and the terror of the climate, the savagery of the natives, and the bitter rivalry among the European traders, have prevented the exploration of the interior so much so that it is amazing to think that we have been acquainted with the Niger Delta for, as I have said, over three centuries and it is only during the present year, that I as the first white man, have explored many of its important rivers for the first time”6.

As already implied such penetrations increased after Johnston’s visit until they led, by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century, to the British conquest and occupation of the whole length and breadth of Igboland and the adjoining territories occupied by the Efik, the Ibibio and the Ekoid Bantu peoples. Yet the changed situation did not immediately bring about remarkable improvement in the quality and quantity of the historical and ethnographic information available to the scholar on the state, societies and institutions of these hinterland peoples of the Bight of Biafra.

The early military and administrative records compiled by the British concentrated on what the British did but paid little attention to the state of society in which those actions were taking place. Only from about the mid-1920’s, when it came to be fully recognized that more intimate knowledge of these societies could help reduce the problems encountered in their administration, did conscious effort to understand them begin. Even then more attention was paid to their political organization than to their economic, social and cultural organizations. This skewed approach characterized even the much orchestrated intelligence report investigations, which came after the women’s uprising of 1929. The result was that much of what was written on war in Igbo society continued to be based largely on armchair speculation. It was the same with the study of Igbo warfare in the 1956 by the highly rated Dr. M.D.W. Jeffries who gave it out that Igbo weapons of war were made mostly out of wood.7 The situation began to change only from the late 1970’s when those of us in the Department of History and Archaeology at the , , introduced the long essay as part of the requirements for the B.A. degree and also instituted a post-graduate programme in history. Both innovations required students benefiting from them to go into the field to collect oral information with which to supplement the written records available to them. Some of the results of this effort, that is the collections of the undergraduates, are included in Professor Elizabeth Isichei’s anthology on the Igbo entitled Igbo Worlds. Now most of the undergraduates, at least in the early years of the programme, were made to write their long essays on topics dealing with the pre-colonial period. It is with the results of these investigations and others related to them that we shall interrogate Olaudah Equiano on his account of Igbo warfare. Our belief is that Igbo society did not undergo any radical socio-political revolution between about 1750 and the colonial century (1860 – 1960) and therefore that we should still have, by the time of these inquiries, in the traditions of the elders survivals of those apparently important features of Igbo warfare highlighted by Equiano in his work..

Igbo Wars: Causation. To Equiano Igbo wars were caused by slave raids which, according to him, were one of the two main methods of recruiting the millions of men and women shipped into slavery across the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean – the second method being by kidnapping. This, he said, was so not only for Igboland but also for all of Africa.

“From what I can recollect of these battles”, he claimed, “they appear to have been irruptions of one little state or district on the other, to obtain prisoners or booty. Perhaps they were incited to this by those traders who brought the European goods I mentioned amongst us. Such a mode of obtaining slaves in Africa is common; and I believe more are procured in this way, and by kidnapping, than any other”8

. Equiano was the first to introduce the factor of slave raids as an important one in the explanation of aspects of Igbo history. For him the raiders came from within Igbo society. It was a case of the Igbo preying upon the Igbo. In the course of the first three or four decades of the twentieth century historians were to resurrect slave raids as an important explanatory factor in Igbo history. One group said the socio-political fragmentation of the Igbo was caused by devastating raids for slaves by the Ijo city states from the south, the Benin Empire from the west and by the Igala and Jukun states from the north, while another group said that protected as they were by high forest, the Igbo were spared political and military pressure from these neighbouring imperialistic states and thus had no compelling reason to adopt centralized institutions. In other words, for these historians the factor of slave raids in Igbo history was an external one.9 Other research - especially by the present writer, K.O. Dike and P.A. Talbot - has shown that slave raiding, whether internal or external, was not a factor of any consequence in Igbo history whether we are thinking of Igbo demographic history as Equiano did or of the history of Igbo political organization and population settlement pattern as the later-day historians did10. On this, one of my students concluded after a study of warfare in pre-colonial Ohuhu for his Masters dissertation as follows: “The slave trade was not one of the major causes of wars in pre-colonial Ohuhu. There were, however, a few instances of disputes that were heightened by tension arising from the capture and sale by one community, of persons from another.”11

To make a long story short, slave raids and slave raiders did not cause the wars that might have been fought in eighteenth century Igboland nor would their activities account for any number of slaves recruited from Igboland and shipped abroad. But for the purpose for which Equiano wrote his book, it was necessary that the slave trade, slave raids and slave raiders be implicated in what was believed to be the barbarous state of Africa that was said to have made the iniquitous slave trade possible.

If slave raiders were not the villains that caused wars in Igbo society, what or who did or did Igbo society not know wars. Certainly there were wars and war alarums in Igbo society, but their causes were different from what Equiano sought to put out either for reasons of propaganda, or because of eroded memory or because being very young at the time he was torn from Igbo culture he would not have known of such high state matters as the anatomy and physiology of war. My own research as well as the research of my students among the Northern Igbo, the part of Igboland in which Equiano’s Essaka was situated, produced overwhelming evidence that Igbo communities did not fight one another on flimsy grounds but only on such occasions as when they disagreed over serious matters that could not be settled otherwise than by war. The evidence also showed that in the overwhelming number of cases such serious disagreements had to do with conflicting claims to land. It does not require to be stated that for a predominantly agricultural people with a dense population, like the Igbo, land was very important – indeed the principal economic asset. Even within the ward, where the drawing of blood was tabooed, people were known to have fought and died for a patch of ground not large enough to take their grave.

Interview results from three areas which were among those parts of Igboland wracked by war for much of the second part of the nineteenth century confirm the submission that land dispute was the principal cause of war among Igbo communities in the pre-colonial period. Chief Edward Nnaji of Idi Nike and his council of chiefs attributed the repeated incidence of war between Nike clan in and Opi in Nsukka to a land dispute which proved impossible to settle until the coming of the British early in the 20th century which led to the imposition of a permanent boundary between the combatants12. In the Nsukka zone, the area occupied by Ichi, Ibagwa Ani, Ibagwa Nkwo and Obukpa did not know peace for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. Again the explanation was dispute over land. According to the traditions, early arrival in this zone had enabled Ibagwa Ani to occupy extensive stretches of fertile land generously punctuated with natural springs, a fact that made her the envy of her neighbours who were not so blessed. Consequently she had on many occasions to face at the same time invasions by her jealous neighbours from different directions. Most prominent among these neighbours of Ibagwa Ani was the Obukpa community that today is the immediate northern neighbour of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Of her it has been said that her fierce and warlike nature arose from her belated effort to acquire cultivable and habitable land from her more favoured neighbours. This fact, it is claimed, made her an ever-present threat to all the surrounding villages and village- groups. It has also been said of her that she readily accepted a call for help from any beleaguered neighbour once the terms of agreement included her right to occupy any piece of territory captured by her during the ensuing war.13 It was a similar story in the Eastern Igbo area particularly in the zone occupied by Okposi and such other communities as Uburu, Amasiri, Ukawu and Ugwulangwu. Repeatedly the entire zone was embroiled in war over rival claims to land. One informant blamed the situation on Okposi’s excessive attachment to land as a result of which the slightest encroachment from any direction triggered off war. This was why, he said, there was and there still is boundary dispute between Uburu and Okposi, between Amasiri and Okposi, between Ugulangwu and Okposi, between Ukawu and Okposi.14

However, it must be pointed out that much as rival claims to land may have been the chief culprit in the matter of causes of pre-colonial Igbo wars, there were other subsidiary factors which at times served as the occasions for rather than the actual causes of wars. These included disruption of trade routes, disruption of markets and rival claims to them, mistreatment of married daughters dead or alive, the need to protect a community’s honour and reputation, unfounded rumours and finally, as with many other human communities, plain mis-apprehension on the part of statesmen and politicians.

Militarisation of Igbo Society. Over and over again Equiano gave the impression that Igbo society was fairly highly militarized. The women were “Amazons” like their sisters in Dahomey – of this more latter. On page 16 – 17 he tells the reader that “All” were trained in the use of some four offensive and one defensive weapons, which he said constituted the weaponry of the Igbo. This “all” included women and children. “I was trained up”, he continues, “from my earliest years in the arts of. war: my daily exercise was shooting and throwing javelins and my mother adorned me with emblems after the manner of our great warriors”.15

On page 17 he asserts: “Our whole district is a kind of militia.” As mentioned earlier the issue of women as frontline soldiers like the men will be treated latter in this paper. Igbo society had neither a professional standing army nor a professional reserve army. Every adult male was expected to rise in defence of his community each time the need arose. Also he was expected to teach himself the use of these weapons just as he had to find the means to equip himself for hunting and warring – the two engagements calling for the use of the same instruments. The perimeter walls of Igbo compounds were a far cry from any attempt to build defensive walls – with some of them being made of mud and wattle, some only of mud and some even of grass and twigs. They were rarely higher than four feet. For the rest there were no armament factories and no community armouries. It was the same , Nkwerre and Abiriba smiths who made the implements for the pursuit of agriculture and crafts who made the weapons for individuals, rather than for communities, when they placed orders for them. There were no formal drill grounds and no drill sergeants. In most parts of Igboland, including Equiano’s Essaka, the age grade system was very weakly developed. The section of Igboland to which all these observations applied is that part which in my delimitation of Igboland into culture sub-groups I designated Igbo ozo or Igbo echichi.16 In this area Nri influence, which was largely eirenic and abhorred bloodshed, was strongly felt. It was in this Igbo ozo or Igbo echichi segment that Equiano’s village fell. It is difficult to understand from where Equiano got the ideas of militarisation that he included in his book as being characteristic of Igbo society.

However, there was another segment of Igbo society, which I have designated Igbo abamaba,17 which has a more pronounced military tradition. Here you had highly integrated age grades that could be turned into regiments during a war, secret societies and all that idolized the warlike tradition and culture. Earlier scholars – Daryll Forde and G.I. Jones - called them Eastern and Cross River Igbo. Here you had the clans of the Igbo whom European ethnographers gave the generic name of Abam believed to signify professional headhunters – the Abam proper, the , the Edda, the Igbere and related groups. Until recently they were popularly designated as the mercenary fighters of Igboland. Perhaps Equiano met in the New World Igbo slaves who came from this area of Igbo society and it must have been through discussions with them that the idea of militarisation of Igbo society got into his head in the first instance. An example is the idea of Igbo Amazons. “Abam” women never went to war. Thus some of the features highlighted by Equiano to prove what a military race his people were would not apply to even this group, the most warlike group in Igboland. And in any case he was not writing about them. Even though he did not say so, we believe that the effort was designed to tell his audience to what extent the slave trade had warped the development of Igbo society, diverted its energies to the self destructive business of preying upon itself and therefore deserved to be torn up root and branch.

Was war endemic in Igbo society? If Equiano did not say so directly, the overall impression he gave of Igbo society of his time was that war was a frequent, or even an ever present, social phenomenon. First he deposed that “the common” in which they exercised their tillage was “often the theatre of war” and that as a result whenever his people went to their farms they went in a group with each person armed to the teeth in order to give a good account of himself if attacked as was often the case. Also Equiano’s people generally slept with one eye open so that whenever the signal of an attack was given they would all “rise in arms and rush upon the enemy”. Then there was the fact that he believed these wars were caused by slave raiding, and that the catching of slaves by means of slave raids was a prevalent economic activity, meant that wars and war alarums were always in the air. The reign of uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence is by definition a feature of a barbarous society. Living on the slave trade, Igbo society was barbarous and being barbarous was thus addicted to acts of bloody violence. To Equiano this portrayal of Igbo society was a powerful reinforcement of the case against the slave trade, the enemy no,1 in The Interesting Narrative.

Igbo society in Equiano’s time and for long after went to great lengths to control the incidence of war and violence if indeed not to abolish them completely. First there was the myth of blood brotherhood right from the lineage segment to the clan, which was a federation of village-groups or rather, the micro-polis. Where this covering myth failed to apply, there was the humanly contrived blood relationship founded on Igba Ndu or Ogbugba Ndu that was supposed to achieve the same purpose of controlling violence and bloodshed. Attendance of the same markets also provided another reason and opportunity for abolishing violence and blood shed amongst the towns and villages concerned. The question that arises is why this repeated emphasis on preserving the peace and avoiding conflict among social segments? One answer that suggests itself is that the Igbo were naturally peace loving. Another is that war and violence between social segments were such recurring phenomena that statesmen and politicians devoted the major part of the time they gave to public service to the control of the demon of war and violence. The fact that most wars were caused by land dispute, as we have tried to show, made it very likely that below the surface, and indeed not very deeply below the surface, of relations between neighbouring communities that had gone through one or two such disputes, there was always the possibility of a renewal of conflict. As one informant put it to me, land is not a consumable commodity that once you get either by conquest or through the adjudication of intercessors you consume and thus remove from the world of visible every day reality. On the contrary the land alienated either by conquest or adjudication by third parties is always there. The result is that any time the losing party passes by the land anger and revenge would well up in them. It is this kind of feeling that even a minor incident such as the molestation of women going to or returning from the market ignites into the major conflagration we refer to as war. Thus technically Equiano was correct in giving the impression that Igbo society in his time was one in which war and rumours of war were a constant reality.

Further more there were over three to four hundred of these loose federations and unions which we refer to as micro-polities or mini-states in Igboland, all involved in the kind of vague and uncertain inter-group relationship that then obtained. We can thus suggest that there would have been no time this very fragile relationship was not breaking down and leading to varying gradations of inter-group conflict in over two dozen places or more all over Igboland. In these conflicts, even though the primary purpose of going to war might not have been the catching of slaves for local use or for sale abroad or both, captives were nonetheless taken. Some of these captives found their way to the coast and to the New World as slaves. When asked how they came to end up as slaves, the reply would be that they were captured in wars and/or raids. In our view this was probably how the tradition built up along the coast, for instance, that the hinterland Igbo of the Bight of Biafra were warlike and maybe blood thirsty and perhaps worse – even cannibals. It was very likely that it was this tradition that Equiano came across either before he left the Bight of Biafra or in the New World or both in the Bight of Biafra and the New World and decided to incorporate in The Interesting Narrative to reinforce the picture he wanted Europe to see of what harm the slave trade was doing to his kinsmen. Igboland was not one political society and thus war being endemic in it would not have the same meaning as saying that war was endemic in the Benin Empire or in the Igala kingdom. With these two states the statement would suggest the onset of political disintegration while with Igbo society it might even suggest the onset of wider integration.

Women and War in Igboland. According to Equiano women in Igbo society and culture were frontline participants in wars just like their sisters, the Amazons of Dahomey. At one point in the book he deposed as follows: “All are taught the use of weapons. Even our women are warriors, and march boldly out to fight along with the men”. Reporting on the battle which he said he had the opportunity to watch in their common he said: “There were many women as well as men on both sides: among others my mother was there, and armed with a broad sword”.18 This is clearly one of the elements Equiano imported into his description of Igbo society from his reading of the travel literature available on West Africa during his time, more specifically from his acquaintance with ethnographic information on Dahomey and her Amazons. G.I. Jones has suggested that this information about Essaka’s women may have been correct because according to him there is information about women from an unnamed and unidentified Isuama community who became warriors when their men declined so much in numbers that they could no longer perform their duty of offence and defence. But this suggestion must be discounted just like Equiano’s claim on this matter for no concrete information has come up in this matter suggesting that Igbo women were warriors in the manner claimed by Equiano. Not even in Igbo folklore and legend does one come across information that supports Equiano’s story. Indeed Igbo folklore says that Chukwu, the Igbo supreme God, banned women from war from early in the history of the Igbo world. According to the story Chukwu was then still experimenting on how to run the Igbo world. First he allowed women to wage war but found they were extremely bloodthirsty and considered an encounter a total failure if even a single member of the opposing forces escaped massacre. In such an event they would return home in tears. When Chukwu asked the men to take the place of the women as warriors, the men would come home jubilating, beating their drums and blowing their trumpets, even if they succeeded in killing only one enemy soldier. For this reason Chukwu decreed that only men should wage war because of their restraint so that mankind would not be wiped out.

The result is that you do not meet in Igbo traditions any mention of women playing the role of gallant frontline soldiers. Even the records kept by the British on the hundreds of battles and skirmishes in which they conquered the Igbo, you do not come across any mention at any point of their having encountered Igbo women during the fighting. This invisibility of Igbo women as warriors is satisfactorily explained by a number of factors. The fact is that as far as war went the Igbo classified the women along with the children – that is as weak members of the society who should be protected during wars. Indeed the killing or wounding of women and children during war was prohibited. Even an “Abam” head hunter would not take a woman’s head for that would win him no social uplift back home. To prevent such an unfortunate eventuality, as women being killed or harmed in war, they were herded together in neighbouring compounds far from the scene of violent conflict, and occasionally guarded by the age group that had just passed the warrior grade. It should be noted that the warring parties generally took matters like this into account. They usually agreed before hand on the location of the battlefield and this was usually in the farmlands distant from their homes. Another factor is that the women were expected to support their men folk from their rear location – cooking food and providing water19 for the fighters as well as attending to the wounded and helping to move the dead after these have been brought out from the battlefield by the men. Also women, especially the category of them known among the Igbo as Umuada, often brought the battle to an end by physically occupying the battlefield since no one would be mad enough to hurt them for to hurt nwada (singular of umuada) was to infringe a very serious taboo which brought upon the unfortunate offender sever consequences dreaded by all.

Thus what we are saying is that Igbo women were not warriors in the sense suggested by Equiano. But they had recognized roles in warfare like the ones already mentioned. Their immunity from attack during a war also placed them in a good enough position to go and come during a lull in the fighting, and thus to collect and transmit intelligence. Also if a woman found herself suddenly involved in a melee, like that described by Equiano, nothing prevented her from defending herself or her husband or whoever with what came ready to hand – a hoe, a matchet, a digger, a club and so on. When I discussed this matter with an elderly woman in the late 1970’s she told me “After all you do not fight with penis but with hands, and women have hands. What a woman will not do and cannot do is to sally forth from the home, armed to the teeth, to meet enemy warriors”. Nor is it being suggested that there were not fearless and fearsome women in Igboland. A good example is the women of Uturu clan, situated just a little to the northeast of my own village-group, whose profession is the weaving of mats and who constantly went beyond the frontiers of their clan in search of raw materials for their craft. As they sallied out each of them would carry a club some five or six feet long. If they ran into an attack, say by headhunters or kidnappers, they would promptly throw their loads on the ground, form a circle round the loads and face the attackers squarely. Their battle cry usually was: “Let no one run so that if any of us is killed we will see it happen with our own eyes.” And invariably they prevailed against their assailants.

Armaments: On this Equiano says: “We have firearms, bows and arrows, broad two-edged swords and javelins; we have shields also which cover a man from head to foot.” Hermann Kohler writing in 1840 from his base in Bonny mentions three weapons used by the Igbo – “knives, daggers, spears”. Neither of the two lists is a comprehensive inventory of the weaponry that existed in pre-colonial Igboland. For something close to that, one would be referred to chapter 13 of Toyin Falola (ed.) Igbo History and Society: Collected Essays of Adiele Afigbo which not only attempts a comprehensive inventory but also a study of their typologies and use along with their role in the evolution of Igbo society and culture. Similarly each of the two inventories gives us a picture different from that given by Dr. M.D.W Jeffries, a former colonial and anthropological officer in Southeastern Nigeria, who writing as a university academic in 1956 gave the totally misleading impression that pre-colonial Igbo weaponry consisted largely of instruments fashioned out of wood.. Equiano tells us that by mid-eighteenth century the Igbo were using weapons many of which were of metal.

Concluding Remarks” One important question which arises for us here is whether Equiano’s inventory is derived from personal observation as a child of eleven years, that is from what he observed of Igbo warfare before he was kidnapped and sold into slavery or it is something drawn from his reading of the general ethnographic literature which became available to him in his later and maturer years in Western society. Unfortunately there is no way of answering this question with certitude. Another important question is about the features of Igbo warfare that Equiano omitted in his account in The Interesting Narrative. War may be defined as what happens from the time when peace between states or independent communities breaks down to the time peace is restored either through the intervention of third or neutral parties or through the exhaustion of the combatants. This interlude may be short or long depending on how equally or unequally matched the combatants are, how grave and deep-rooted the causes of the conflict are. But whether the interlude is short or long the things that happen within it include: - propaganda offensive, the mobilization of each side not only physically but also morally and psychically, the actual declaration of war at times after agreement has been reached on codes for the conduct of the war, the collection of intelligence, the actual taking of the field by the combatants, the taking of captives, the death of some fighters, the intervention of third parties leading generally to the suspension of fighting and then to settlement. A near comprehensive treatment of Igbo warfare would cover all these and perhaps more. Equiano made no attempt to cover all these matters. But of course Equiano was not writing an academic disquisition on Igbo warfare. His concern was to show by what dastardly methods the human goods of the infamous triangular trade were obtained.

This paper should be read in conjunction with chapter 5 of my Ropes of Sand: Studies In Igbo History And Culture (Ibandan, UPL, 1981).

1 I am using the 9th edition printed in Norwich in 1794.

2 The Interesting Narrative p.viii

3 Ibid. p15 - 18

4 Isichei, E., Igbo Worlds (Macmillan, London, 1977) p.10

5 Ibid, p.14

6 Report on the British Protectorate of the Oil Rivers (Niger Deita) by H.H. Johnston; Enclosed in Despatch of 1st December 1888 in F.O. 84/1882 7 Jeffries, M.D.W., Igbo Warfare in Man No. 77, June 1956

8 The Interesting Narrative, pp.15 -16

9 Falola,T, (ed.) Myth, History and Society: The Collected Works of Adiele Afigbo (Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ, 2006) see chapter 8 “War and Historical Explanation in Eastern Nigeria”, p.143 - 160

10 Ibid

11 Emezue, S. “Warfare In Pre-Colonial Ohuhu”, Unpublished M.A. Dissertation U.N.N, 1983, p.129

12 Field Note in the custody of the author

13 Nsukka field note in the custody of the author

14 Nwachukwu, I.E., “Okposi and Her Neighbours” B.A. Long Essay Ebonyi State University, 2008.

15 The Interesting Narrative, p.31

16 Afigbo, A.E., (ed.) Groundwork Of Igbo History, (V9sta Press, Lagos, 1992) chapter 7

17 Ibid

18 The Interesting Narrative pp.16 and 17

19 This role was played by young girls who had not reached the age of menstruation and by those who had attained menopause. In times of war Igbo warriors were expected to stay away from sex and from anything touched by menstruating women. This was to conserve their strength and protect their charms.