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 kingdo...