By Ata Ukuta

About Eight years ago, I started a project titled – The Kings And Kingdoms of the Niger Delta as the photography facilitator of the Harmattan Workshop held at The Niger Delta Centre For Art And Culture in Agharha-tor, Delta State, Nigeria. This workshop is an annual workshop where artists from all over the world are invited to create Art by the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation (BOF) that is chaired by one of Africa’s greatest artists – Bruce Obomeyoma Onobrakpeya. For those who do not know him, he is a Nigerian printmaker, painter, and sculptor. He has exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., USA, and the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö, Sweden among other great locations where his works can be found like the Vatican City. Foreign leaders like India’s Indira Gandhi and Sadam Hussein once sort Onobrakpeya’s audience and creations and collected his art. This project, Kings And Kingdoms of the Niger Delta was funded by BOF with the very keen interest of Bruce Onobrakpeya.

During this project, I came across many details about the Urhobo nation that ought to be common knowledge but was only known to a handful. The fact that Urhobo has more than twenty kingdoms whose indigenes sometimes prefer to promote a narrative that dignifies their kingdom was a cause for concern. Another reason why it is difficult to get a cohesive and consistent narrative was that most of Africa’s recorded history is unrecorded. Many tribes get their history or origin from oral narratives passed down from generation to generation. But this is not unique to Africa or the Urhobos. As technologically developed as the Japanese, they are still reviewing the narrative of their origin. What we must come to terms with is that most kingdoms or tribes are not formed exclusively from one source. Most were started by one but later integrated into a larger unit comprising of others who join from neighboring tribes or kingdoms. Others like England in the United Kingdom were formed by a migrating tribe from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries.

Globally, most tribes or kingdoms come into existence by the migration of their progenitor from a larger more powerful kingdom or the congregation of smaller settlements into a larger community. In the absence of written history which most kingdoms lack at their very beginning, two sources of historical narrative have greater accuracy:

1. Royal familied kingdom narrative and
2. Indigenous priest narrative

In Urhoboland, the three kingdoms with Royal families, are Agbarha, Ogor, and Ughelli Kingdoms. All other kingdoms formerly had indigenous priests who were reliable custodians of historical facts that have been passed from high priest to high priest. These three kingdoms have the advantage of having both sources of the royal family and traditional priests. They also have a consistency in their narrative that shows all the evidence of a fact-based narrative that is truthful and reliable. Hence, I was encouraged to dig deeper. The more I researched the origin of the Urhobos, the more the narratives of the kings of these three Urhobo kingdoms I personally interviewed showed more uniformity. Their narrative is also in agreement with more kingdoms in Urhoboland who are direct indigenes or descendants of Agbarha Kingdom that formed Agbarha-Ame kingdom in Warri South Local government area, and Oghara, Idjerhe and Mosogar kingdoms in Ethiope West local government area. No other narrative has this type of clear-cut verifiable association in Nigeria and probably in Africa. Okpe kingdom that sometimes sees themselves as a separate tribe because of the obvious difference in the language they speak, trace their origin without controversy to Olomu kingdom that speaks the general Urhobo dialect, whose King I also personally interviewed. I cannot conclude the discussion about the origin of the Urhobos in this piece alone. But the most reliable source yet, from these three monarchs whose family makes the first Royal family of the Urhobos that is made up of 3 brothers and a sister that formed Orogun Kingdom is the path worth exploring. It is the path that can unquestionably be fact-checked by present kings and kingdoms in Urhoboland.

Ata Ukuta, Editor – www.towncryyers.com