From Country to Confusion: The Colonial Conflation of Aboh from a Distinct Deltaic Identity to a Blurred Ethnic Classification - Part One

 From Country to Confusion: The Colonial Conflation of Aboh from a Distinct Deltaic Identity to a Blurred Ethnic Classification  - Part One

By Emeka Esogbue

Introduction

This article revisits the historical identity of the Aboh polity of the lower Niger once one of the foremost riverine kingdoms of precolonial West Africa. It examines how Aboh’s distinct political, cultural, and diplomatic traditions were gradually obscured by colonial ethnography, which subsumed the people under broader linguistic and administrative labels such as “Ukwuani” and “Igbo.” Through historical reconstruction and comparative analysis, the author argues that Aboh was not a mere dialectal cluster but a sovereign Delta kingdom whose unique identity was diluted through colonial simplification and postcolonial repetition, an outcome of the British mechanical process of ethnic classification.

Aboh in the Delta Province

By the fifteenth century, Aboh had emerged as an organized and powerful riverine kingdom located in what was later known as the Delta Province. Oral traditions link its early rulers to dynasties believed to have emerged as early as the 14th - 15th centuries contemporaneous with the Benin expansion and the Ijo city-states of the Niger Delta. The kingdom's location on the lower Niger river made it a gateway between the hinterland and the Atlantic, giving it immense commercial and military advantages. As Obaro Ikime observed in The Peoples and Kingdoms of the Delta Province (in Groundwork of Nigerian History, ed. Obaro Ikime, HEBN Publishers Plc, 1980, p. 89), the term “Delta” is an apt description. The Delta Province covered what may be termed the western Delta of the Niger, and it was broadly divided into two zones - the lower Delta and the upper Delta.

The lower Delta was home to the Ijo, Itsekiri, and Aboh, while the upper Delta was inhabited by the Isoko, Urhobo, and Ukwuani. This division shaped the social relations and occupational pursuits of the region’s peoples, whose environments determined their livelihoods and interactions.

Although the peoples of the Delta Province were heterogeneous in origin, some shared linguistic similarities. For instance, the Urhobo and Isoko languages are closely related, just as Aboh and Ukwuani share linguistic affinities. Yet despite these linguistic links, each group regarded itself as distinct, separate, and independent. As Ikime rightly notes, “the awareness of belonging together is a recent development.” Indeed, during the British “hurried” construction of ethnic groupings in Nigeria, even as Isoko was classified under Urhobo, the Isoko people vigorously reasserted their separate ethnic identity, a reminder of how colonial oversimplification could not erase local consciousness.

Aboh as a Riverine Power

As E. J. Alagoa recounts in A History of the Niger Delta: An Historical Interpretation of Ijo Oral Traditions (1972), Aboh emerged as a formidable riverine economy that dominated much of the Delta Province. The people became expert canoe builders, fishermen, and traders who controlled key waterways linking the Niger interior to the Delta and the coast. They dealt in salt, slaves, palm produce, ivory, and European goods, and by the sixteenth century, Aboh had established contact with the Portuguese.

From a precolonial standpoint, Aboh was not merely a “town” or “community.” Nor was it just a “kingdom” in the limited European sense of the term. In substance and function, Aboh was a sovereign political entity, a country in its own right. It was, in the context of West Africa, what Portugal or Spain represented in Europe: a political, economic, maritime, and naval power. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, Aboh exercised control over a defined territory extending along the lower Niger and its tributaries such as the Ase, Ndoni, and Utu rivers. The kingdom collected tolls and tributes from dependent villages and trading posts within its domain.

Diplomacy and International Recognition

Aboh enjoyed diplomatic recognition from its neighbors and from early European visitors. Within the inland Niger and Anioma regions, the kingdom dispatched emissaries to Ebu, Ukwuani, Nsukwa, and Onicha-Ugbo to maintain trade and political alliances. These ambassadors ensured the free flow of agricultural produce from the hinterlands to Aboh ports.

Simultaneously, Aboh maintained commercial envoys and diplomatic representatives in Bonny, Brass, and Itsekiri territories to secure trade and political understanding. They negotiated the terms of canoe passage, exchange of captives, and mutual defense against pirates or rival trading states.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European explorers and traders recognized Aboh as an independent power. In his 1832 journal, Richard Lander frequently referred to Aboh as a “kingdom” or “country of the Obi.” Similarly, Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s Niger Journals (1841) described it as “the country of Aboh, ruled by a powerful king.” When British officials later sought treaties in the Niger Delta, they did so directly with the Obi of Aboh, not through any superior authority, an explicit acknowledgment of Aboh’s sovereignty.

This was precisely how sovereignty operated in precolonial Africa: through mutual recognition, diplomatic engagement, and territorial control. In every sense, Aboh was a sovereign country especially, as there was nothing like "ethnic group" in the oral knowledge of the African inhabitants  geopolitical dictionary of the people of what later became "Nigeria." It was only a matter of time before the British started the classification to suit their administrative convenience; a route to the easy route of colonial governance and access to exploiting the area and commercially enriching their home country.

The Lander Brothers Incident

Foreign traders, explorers, and missionaries required the Obi’s permission to navigate the Niger. The capture of the Lander Brothers by Aboh people in 1830 stands as one of the most dramatic and historically pivotal episodes in Niger Delta history. The explorers had failed to seek permission before navigating the river, and their capture demonstrated Aboh’s independence and authority over the Niger corridor even in the early nineteenth century.

Upon returning to England, Richard Lander published Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger (1832), where he described Aboh as a formidable and populous river kingdom whose people were bold, proud, and well organized under a powerful ruler. He portrayed Obi Ossai as intelligent but cautious—a leader accustomed to controlling all movement on the river.

This event left a lasting impression on British policymakers. It confirmed Aboh’s political and military strength and signaled that European penetration of the Niger would be impossible without local alliances. The Lander Brothers episode also drew British attention to the wider Anioma region, paving the way for later tensions that culminated in the Ekumeku Movement, a resistance against the imposition of British trade and authority.

(See Richard and John Lander, “Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger,” John Murray, 1832.)

Symbols of Sovereignty

Aboh sustained its sovereignty with a strong naval force, which patrolled long stretches of the Niger River and maintained economic dominance through control of trade in slaves, palm oil, ivory, fish, and salt. Armed canoes and fortified river bases protected its commerce and reinforced its independence.

The people of Aboh shared a common language variant, maintained religious institutions centered on river deities, and upheld national symbols such as royal insignia, regalia, and ceremonial drums. These provided a shared sense of national identity just as the Ijo, Benin, or Itsekiri peoples expressed their own statehood through ritual and sovereignty.

From Country to Confusion

How then did Aboh, which functioned as a full-fledged country in the international sense of the precolonial Delta world, become ethnically classified by the British under other existing peoples?

The answer lies in the colonial ethnographic process that conflated linguistic similarity with political identity, reducing sovereign polities to mere “tribes.” While the Aboh polity itself had a distinct deltaic and riverine identity, that predated ethnic classification of Nigeria by the British, the British did classifications that blurred and conflated the people, placing them under communities. The next part of this series will examine this transformation, tracing how Aboh’s distinct nationhood was rewritten through the administrative convenience and cultural assumptions of the British Empire.