Emeka Esogbue

 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...

  Ibusa: Rich in Okpuzu Waterfall, Poor in Tourism - Emeka Esogbue One area the Ibusa community is lacking in development is the tourism sector. To think that the Ibusa community has everything but tourism is an unfavorable omen to the loaded people of the community. To further think that the community has what other communities do not have in the distinctive Okpuzu Waterfall is to be curious about what the people do with this endowment. In 2008, an article appeared online in which compilers called for the contributions of tourist sites in Delta State. This author (Dr. Emeka Esogbue), quickly listed the Okpuzu Waterfall, the steep descent water of the Oboshi River in the community as a potential site for tourism in Delta State. A few years later, the author received a call from a crew of researchers who attempted to dig into the waterfall for identification and documentation. Sensing that the researchers whose planned journey to the fall had been announced would be accompan...