Struggle for Control of the Hinterland of the Bight of Biafra: The Untold Story of the British Military Expedition to Igbo Land (1830-1930)

By Dr. Frank Nwabueze Ihekwaba

This book tells the story of the people of Igbo land at the middle of the nineteenth century, when Europe and Europeans held the dominant power over the lives and affairs of many peoples in Africa. This dominance, however, was never supposed to be total or absolute. Nevertheless, it managed to cast a constricting shadowwith its associated, if unhealthy, ambienceon the day-to-day lives of the people using the overwhelming military and economic power at its disposal at a time when Africans were either recovering from five hundred years of stupor brought on by its own dark ages (AD 11001600) or the shock and paralysis that followed the Moroccan (Mohamedan) and Spanish-mercenary-assisted mayhem and chaos of 1591 against the African kingdoms of West Africa.

But the white man would soon lose most of his political and economic opportunities, and some of the absolute attributes he had mustered over the years the moment Britain and the other European races saw themselves as divinely appointed to right the wrongs of mankind. He would, from then on, render himself vulnerable to the tide of African enlightenment and progress, which was then building up everywhere, once the trade by which he had gained his ascendency over the other races of mankind began to decline. In addition, European ascendency witnessed an unusual reversal of luck when its residual strengths, recently boosted with the development of some newer types of weaponrythe Maxim machine gun in the UK (1883) and the Mauser Machine gun (1891) in Germanyweapons whose astonishing power and versatility had not previously been seen or tested in any battlefront, became more widely available to European and non-European troops. These, however, could not provide definitive answers to all the tactical and strategic imperatives of the developing new battlefront which European armies had sought. Nevertheless, these new weapons became celebrated after they were successfully used to hold the line and repel hordes of brave native fighters armed only with machetes and spears (South Africa) and bows and arrows (Kitcheners Sudan), enabling British forces to claim easy victories over the native forces; several Victoria Crosses would be won on both battlefronts by the British army. The success of the campaigns clearly went to the heads of the victorious army commanders. Thus were sown the seeds that would grow, leading to the idea of invincibility of the white man in the battlefield and the tragic events that preceded the First World War (19141918).

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504998239

Dr. Frank Nwabueze Ihekwaba

Dr. Frank Nwabueze Ihekwaba, MB. ChB (Edin), FRCS. FICS. FWACS, Postgrad. Cert. Immunol. is a retired Senior Lecturer in Surgery at the University of Liverpool, and Consulting Surgeon to the Royal Liverpool Hospital, England. He was, formerly, Senior Lecturer in Surgery, University of Ibadan, and Consulting Surgeon to the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. Educated at the Government College, Afikpo, (1953 -1957), and at the Norwich City College, Norfolk, England, (1961-1962), he went up to Edinburgh University where he studied medicine. Upon graduation, he took up several appointments at major UK and US hospitals. He returned to Nigeria to take up an appointment as Senior Registrar at the University of Ibadan in 1975, after which he was offered a Lectureship; this was followed by a Senior Lectureship in Surgery. An offer of a Research Fellowship in Surgery by the Trust Fund for Surgical Research in the Commonwealth, Oxford, England in 1981 took him to several research centres in the UK. In 1987, he was appointed Commissioner of Health in the Imo State Government. At the end of his service, he returned to Ibadan, proceeding, in 1991, to the UK for his Sabbatical Leave from whence he was appointed to various positions at major UK hospitals and research centres. He retired in 1999. He now spends his time between the UK and Nigeria, indulging his life-long passions and interests in writing, military history, and farming.

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© 2016 Frank Ihekwaba. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/21/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9822-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9821-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-9823-9 (e)

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Contents

Chapter 1 – Umukurushe

One Day in 1898

Chapter 2 – London (1830)

Lord Palmerston takes the helm at the British Foreign Office

Chapter 3 – An Expedition Sets Out From England to Search for Bounty on the Niger Coast

(1841)

Chapter 4 – A New Niger Expedition Sets Sail from England (1854)

Chapter 5 – Imperial European States Meet In Berlin (1884)

Chapter 6 – The Early European Interest in Igboland

(1500-1860)

Chapter 7 – Imperial European States on the Warpath

Chapter 8 – Imperial European States Have Ways of Dealing with ‘Truculent Tribes’ In the African Interior

Chapter 9 – The Imperial Idea of a ‘Protectorate ‘In the Hinterland of the Bight of Biafra’ Begins To Take Shape

Chapter 10 – The British Way of War

(1750-1900)

Chapter 11 – The British Expeditionary Forces (BEF) Begin to Concentrate at the Gates of Igboland

Chapter 12 – The Military Reality at ‘Old Calabar’ (Duke Town) On the Eve of War

Chapter 13 – The Militarization of the Hinterland of the Bight of Biafra in the Period 1500-1900 AD

Chapter 14 – The Rise of the Firearm among the Igbo

Earliest Origins of Guns and Gunpowder in Igboland

Chapter 15 – The Further Development of The Firearm Among the Igbo

(c.1680 - c.1880)

Chapter 16 – On Going To War

Chapter 17 – The Ancient Igbo Art of Waging War

Chapter 18 – The Eve of War

About the author

Dr. Frank Nwabueze Ihekwaba, MB. ChB (Edin), FRCS. FICS. FWACS, Postgrad. Cert. Immunol. is a retired Senior Lecturer in Surgery at the University of Liverpool, and Consulting Surgeon to the Royal Liverpool Hospital, England. He was, formerly, Senior Lecturer in Surgery, University of Ibadan, and Consulting Surgeon to the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. Educated at the Government College, Afikpo, (1953 -1957), and at the Norwich City College, Norfolk, England, (1961-1962), he went up to Edinburgh University where he studied medicine. Upon graduation, he took up several appointments at major UK and US hospitals. He returned to Nigeria to take up an appointment as Senior Registrar at the University of Ibadan in 1975, after which he was offered a Lectureship; this was followed by a Senior Lectureship in Surgery. An offer of a Research Fellowship in Surgery by the Trust Fund for Surgical Research in the Commonwealth, Oxford, England in 1981 took him to several research centres in the UK. In 1987, he was appointed Commissioner of Health in the Imo State Government. At the end of his service, he returned to Ibadan, proceeding, in 1991, to the UK for his Sabbatical Leave from whence he was appointed to various positions at major UK hospitals and research centres. He retired in 1999. He now spends his time between the UK and Nigeria, indulging his life-long passions and interests in writing, military history, and farming.

About the book……

This book tells the story of the people of Igbo land at the middle of the 19th century when Europe, and Europeans held the dominant power over the lives and affairs of many peoples in Africa. This dominance, however, was never supposed to be total or absolute. Nevertheless, it managed to cast a constricting shadow – with its associated, if unhealthy, ambience - on the day to day lives of the people using the overwhelming military and economic power at its disposal at a time when Africans were either recovering from 500 years of stupor brought on by its own Dark Ages (AD 1100-1600), or the shock and paralysis that followed the Moroccan (Mohamedan) and Spanish mercenary-assisted mayhem and chaos of 1591 against the African kingdoms of West Africa.

But the white man would soon lose most of his political and economic opportunities, and some of the absolute attributes he had mustered over the years the moment Britain and the other European races saw themselves as divinely appointed to right the wrongs of mankind. He would, from then on, render himself vulnerable to the tide of African enlightenment and progress which was then building up everywhere, once the trade by which he had gained his ascendency over the other races of mankind began to decline. In addition, European ascendency witnessed an unusual reversal of luck when its residual strengths, recently boosted with the development of some newer types of weaponry – the Maxim machine gun in the UK (1883), and the Mauser Machine gun (1891) in Germany - weapons whose astonishing power and versatility had not previously been seen or tested in any battle front, became more widely available to European and non-European troops. These, however, could not provide definitive answers to all the tactical and strategic imperatives of the developing new battle front which European armies had sought. Nevertheless, these new weapons became celebrated after they were successfully used to hold the line and repel hordes of brave native fighters armed only with machetes and spears (South Africa), and bows and arrows (Kitchener’s Sudan), enabling British forces to claim easy victories over the native forces; several Victoria Crosses would be won on both battle fronts by the British army. The success of the campaigns clearly went to the heads of the victorious army commanders. Thus, were sown, the seeds that would grow, leading to the idea of invincibility of the white man in the battle field, and the tragic events that preceded the First World War (1914 – 1918)

But before lessons from these tragic errors could be learned and actions taken to assess their worth and relevance to the evolving economic, political, and military situations, several European states began to flex their muscles in preparation for an almighty scramble for territory on the African land mass, where they hoped to reap rich dividends from the poorer economies there, these, to replenish the short falls in their exchequer balance sheets, following the ending of the African Slave Trade in 1837.

The Gulf of Guinea, and the lands adjoining it, became the scene of an intense and obscene struggle launched by European peoples to win land, territory, gold, diamonds, timber, and influence; but the first real shots to be fired there were to be in the lands of the Ashanti (Gold Coast) in 1871, where gold had been mined since before Pharaonic times. The Ashanti Wars (1871-1899) became the definitive test of the African’s ability to fight off and defend what Providence had bestowed on him.

Struggle for Control of the Hinterland of the Bight of Biafra is the untold story of the British Military expedition to the heart-lands of the Igbo people - some of the most difficult and unexplored regions of the continent with its harsh and rugged terrain, sparse vegetation, gully erosion, wild animals, poisonous snakes, and jungle. Armed with nothing to fight, but the bare nails on their fingers, the Igbo, together with their neighbours, waged an heroic and relentless peoples’ war for 7 years against British Imperial forces that had had battlefield experience, right from the American Revolutionary Wars (1775-1783), the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1816), the Balkan (Crimean) Wars (1854-1856), and the Ashanti Wars (1871 -1899).

Struggle for Control of the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra is a tragic and harrowing tale of pain, plunder, and the abuse of military power levied on a total-war scale with the destruction of the peoples’ homes, the burning of their crops, the seizure or capture of their animals, and the arrest of the leading men, against a small national resistance movement in the Imperial age of the gun-boat, but also of courage by the defenders of the Igbo national homeland, in the face of a blizzard of lyddite, shrapnel, and case shot.

This Book is

Dedicated to My Brother

Captain (Dr.) Victor Chinyere Ihekwaba

MB.BS (Dunelm)

(1934-1984)

Sometime Member of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Officers Training Corps (OTC) (1958-1963);

Sometime Senior Medical Officer and Captain, Biafran Army Medical Corps,

(1966-1970)

Late Consulting Anaesthesiologist; University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Enugu (1978-1984)

Who Encouraged Me with Much Advice and Rare Insights into Matters Military and Strategic during the Early Stages of this Work, but did not live to see the Completion of this Book.

Preface

No account of the naval explorations undertaken by Britain into the Lower Niger River, its adjoining lands, and its delta, from the year AD 1800 exists. The British military expedition in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra between 1895 and 1912 which followed the naval explorations is barely remembered by any of the generations of the Igbo born after 1920. That expedition, which sought to disarm the Igbo peoples, wreak havoc on their lives, destroy their culture and their religion, and ruin their economic activities and their way of life, leaving a trail of injury, chaos, mayhem, and death is now all but forgotten. The war which the military expedition precipitated – the struggle for control of the Igbo interior and its markets, roads and waterways - described pessimistically by the women of Eastern Nigeria in 1929 after the Women’s Revolt as ‘The First Biafra War’, is now barely remembered by the Igbo peoples themselves.

Nothing of the history of the period, nor of the causes of the struggle and its consequences on the lives of the ordinary people, especially in the period immediately after it, has, in the 100 years since the fighting ended, been brought to the attention of the Igbo nation, or to anyone else. Yet, it was their ancestors – grand-parents and great grand-parents – who, suspecting the intensions of the Europeans, their cohorts, their escorts, and their armed bands and patrols when they came ashore to make contact with them, correctly guessed the reasons for their arrival on their shores.

It was the Igbo peoples of that epoch - with literally nothing but the bare nails on their fingers when war clouds began to gather in 1900, eventually exploding into a general war in 1901 - who planned the people’s defence of their lands and the safety of their sacred religious institutions and icons. It was the men and women of that period who, fighting almost to the death, ultimately halted the enemy’s advance, preventing him from extending his reach inland and effecting his planned programme of rapine, destruction and conquest, in the deeper recesses of the Igbo homeland.

This was the generation that bore the brunt of the onslaughts delivered by an enemy that was as determined to gain a foothold on Igbo soil as he was ruthless in his methods of achieving it, bringing to his advantage his superior weaponry, including naval, logistic, and tactical resources which had been acquired and tried out in battlefields across the Americas (the American Revolutionary Wars: 1775-1783), Central Europe (the Napoleonic Wars: 1793-1816), the Balkans (the Crimean War: 1854-1856), and the Gold Coast (the Ashanti Wars: 1871-1899). It was their heroism that gave the Igbo peoples of our day the dignity and freedoms that are theirs to know and enjoy today.

If the accounts of the struggles waged with the enemy which have reached us derive largely - but not completely - from his own records, it is because our own heroes, long muted in their graves - unsung, unwept, unacknowledged and unremembered, by their descendants - did not write anything down. Like the Picts, they stood in danger of being forgotten by their descendants, by history, and by the world.

Fortunately, Igbo oral traditions - in this as in many other areas - have stepped in to rescue the historical record of the Igbo of the period and the military traditions of the race. Imperfect, though they sometimes were - but shown time and again to be as dependable and useful a resource as any others from which the historian had taken his bearings - these traditions have enabled US to fill in gaps and doubts in the available British source material. They have stood up to the challenge posed by inconsistencies thrown up by British Imperial official accounts and helped us restore and give meaning to records that would otherwise have been lost to Igbo posterity. To these oral traditions, and to those who left them to the race, the Igbo nation gives thanks.

Remarkably detailed in some areas, even if they are less so in others, they are sufficiently robust in many areas in the insights and revelations they give the writer and his reader, especially when they refer to events already described in British, Dutch-trader, or Church-affiliated, archival records but which, for various reasons, the British Imperial recorder, probably as a result of oversight, or under orders to suppress, ignore, give a different slant, emphasis or hue to the incident in question, had reported otherwise. The result is that the Igbo account offers us a refreshingly new and interesting alternative - a reasonably credible alternative - record of events that are sometimes more cohesive, detailed, insightful, and convincing than those provided by the Imperial war correspondent. This gives the historian of our day a chance to closely test British battlefield claims as revealed in their despatches. Only thus have we been able to understand and explain the reasons the Imperial forces seemed always to win every battle, every position, every struggle, and every day!

Battles are won or lost for a variety of reasons. We have noted the frequent echoes of Imperial triumphalism trumpeted to the world for two centuries and more in India, in China, in the Gold Coast (Ghana), and in the Arabian Peninsula. We have seen the power, mind, and brawn of European soldiery documented in many British battlefield despatches. Nowhere, however, have we seen any records that explain the Igbo combatant’s point of view, his courage praised, or his bravery celebrated.

There are no records that explain the difficulties, dilemmas or constraints that confronted the Igbo commander on the front line. Nothing that we have seen protected his forward positions, his flanks, or his rear, nor have we seen anything that guided or influenced decisions taken by him to defend the various sectors, clans, tribes or districts under his watch.

There is nothing in the available records, either British or Igbo, that throws any light concerning the strategic options that availed themselves to him and adopted by him in each combat area as the fighting, when it erupted, progressed, nor of the short term and loco-regional tactical moves made by those who supported him and who did the actual fighting to ward off the enemy pressure in his sector. As these may have been the local chiefs, rear guard runners and vigilantes, frontline or village commanders, or some other partisan operatives, their accounts - had they been available - would seem to us to have been eminently valuable source material to the historian and one that could have enhanced our story, giving it greater power, visibility, authority, and credibility from the standpoint of the reader.

The military moves which each man or group made to advance the momentum of the action in his area at a particular point in time, together with the ideas or reasons that guided the leading men at the rear in each district in making or ordering those decisions in those areas, are other aspects of this absorbing story that would have enhanced our understanding of this titanic and heroic struggle, had they been available. All that we have to guide us, apart from our oral traditions which themselves, are not expected to give the reader the blow by blow account of events in each area, are the opinions and speculations of the officers commanding the British Expedition Forces in each area.

Although we have been able to infer or make certain deductions concerning the challenges weighing on the minds of the front line soldiers on the Igbo battle front, our understanding and appreciation of the action would have been immeasurably enriched had we had access into the mind of the defending army commander himself. Notwithstanding these deficiencies, we have been able, from the available oral traditions, to reconstruct the story and make it flow. And where they appear incoherent, we have been able to trace and follow the narrative by referring to other sources such as the local international traders, the local interpreters, the surviving eye witnesses, and the records of the missionary personnel. This strategy has enabled us appreciate the enormous dilemmas that confronted the leading actors or groups, and how each group managed to overcome the difficulties that confronted it.

Nor are we unaware of the dangers that daily threatened to engulf the Igbo positions whether during an advance, retreat or when trapped in an enemy tactical feint. This is an important consideration in what was, after all, classic ‘bush warfare’ with their traps, covered trenches, and treacherous river crossing points; for no adversary will strain himself to mitigate or forgive the plight, the error or foolishness of his enemy when he had got him trapped in-between the cruel jaws of his vice, ready for the kill. War, they say, is a very serious business!

This account is given, as researched and collected from several sources. The writer believes that as far as has been possible, it is faithful to the facts as seen on the ground at the time when they were discovered and recorded by his sources. Whatever deficiencies, inconsistencies, textual discrepancies or omissions that the reader may detect in this historical account today should not be attributed to the heroes that fought the war. The fault never lay with them; they lay squarely with the people of later generations.

It was never the intention of the fallen - and their comrades in arms who survived them - that their courage, victories, and brave deeds, nor indeed their failures and losses, be buried with them in the sands of time. Herein lay the raison d’etre for this work: namely, that notwithstanding the loss of the ancient Igbo tradition of documentation and writing which did not endure over time, the record and actions of the Igbo combatants in this struggle did not wither or die with them!

Nor could the tradition of written documentation have endured in the age that succeeded them, given the people’s varied sedentary and mobile culture – a culture of a semi-literate – though some were literate in their own way in the unique environment in which they lived their lives, never wishing to set anything down, having no secure way of preserving them - travelling great distances in the search for living space and the needs of daily living; a culture that placed great reliance on the power of the human mind and of the memory. This was the culture of a people much troubled by friend and by foe, harried at every stage throughout the ages by famine and by hunger, by a cruel humid climate, the restless termite, the vicissitudes of time and, much maligned by their adversaries. This was the most compelling reason why the people drew in their horns to ensure their ultimate survival.

Nor are their descendants, blameless. They cared not a whit about the struggles the men of the past endured – the sacrifices they made, the risks they took, and the heavy price they paid with their blood and with their lives in the face of overwhelming adversity. With rank dereliction they were, forever, consumed by their own constant and never-ending, if selfish, individual struggle to stay ahead of the game, in front of the next man, and stay alive. They never even took time to set down the record of the past so that later generations may remember and bear witness to the strivings of the men and women of the age that had gone before them, and learn something from, and about them.

That is why their story - the story of those that came through and the thousands of nameless fallen - is given here for the first time. It is likely that others will again tell the story, probably from the same, or a different, perspective.

The underlying reasons alleged by Britain - and offered to the world - for the struggle and the military expedition that followed it, and that nation’s pretext for imposing a brutal and cruel war on the Igbo peoples and their neighbours were difficult to understand or defend; they were clearly different from those advanced by other Imperial European states that were engaged, at one time or another, in the same aggressive search in Africa for a ‘place in the sun’ where their countrymen might swagger, live a life of ease, and relax in the sun - and with little difficulty, exploit the forests, the land, and the people, seen by them as ‘benighted natives’.

The view of many –historian, researcher, and reader - anyone who had cared to study the political and trading conditions at the time, the structure of Igbo society before and since, as well as informed opinion and explanations proffered by certain groups of missionaries - ‘the handmaidens of the Imperial interest’ – everywhere discounted official British claims made then, and later, that it had intervened militarily in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra ‘solely to put an end’ to certain religious practices prevalent throughout the area. It was necessary, Britain had claimed, that it brought European-oriented Christian civilization to the ‘savage tribes in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra’. But could this line of argument stand up to scrutiny?

Reasons for War

Territorial Acquisition, Booty, Trade Goods, and Raw Materials

A close study of the prevailing political and trading conditions in the entire area of the Bight of Biafra during the period, the dire economic conditions in which many European nations found themselves, especially in the period immediately after the ending of the Slave Trade between 1837 and the middle 1850s, as well as the mood of the ordinary peoples of the Imperial states of Europe who stood to gain whatever advantages – profits, treasure, loot, booty, etc. - their governments might bring back from Africa to alleviate their plight, will show that the real reasons for imposing war on the Igbo peoples were largely economic and territorial. Most of the governments had seen, and urged, a compelling case for going out to Africa - the wild, virgin, unexplored, and potentially enormously rich continent, inhabited by ‘savages’ - to pluck whatever there was there that could support or supplement the meagre returns to their exchequers from their existing sources of public income.

At the heart of these dire economic conditions - and the search for remedies that could ameliorate and possibly eradicate them - lay the urgent need for new sources of raw materials to feed British industry. It was necessary, too, to provide cheap avenues for capital inflow to adjust the ballooning debt profile run up by the nation’s exchequer and find ready markets for dumping its manufactured goods.

A second reason for war in the Biafran hinterland was the ‘competing political rivalries’ among European states at the time to ensure that others did not steal a match on Britain. This was the reason behind the breakneck search for new territories in Africa and the world at large. It gave credence and substance to the widespread suspicion everywhere that Britain’s real interest was driven by its citizen’s long-standing prayer that their nation should secure a commanding position and dominance over the other nations of the European family.

A third reason may be described as largely facetious and vainglorious. This was the need for ‘possessions and empire where the sun never sets’. This, it was hoped, would enhance and satisfy the nation’s craving that its voice should be heard ‘wherever men live on earth’.

Notwithstanding any of these stated situations, at the heart of it all, lay the need for land - a place under the African sun where life might be lived with ease and the produce of the land, safely and usefully exploited. Such a land, if large and endowed with a labour force that was both docile and unaccustomed to agitation for increased wages, human rights, and with luck, which also possessed a large expanse of virgin forest, replete with timber and minerals that would, like South Africa - already the life line that sustained England since the slave trade came to an end - be a boon, a preserve for the white man, and a godsend, to the Imperial Government and the peoples of the British Isles.

Could these have been the real reasons for the struggle to gain a foothold in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra? Could these have been the underlying and unedifying official thinking in London - never offered or announced, never urged openly within the smoke rooms of the British Parliament or declared outside it, despite working over-time in the heat of the moment, to conceal the real intentions of a Government - a British Government - in an age when it was pitifully lagging behind other European Imperial nations in the search for a ‘global empire’.

Could the purported need to extend the ‘Judaeo-Christian civilization’ be advanced as reason enough for the murderous military assaults and the blizzard of lyddite-laden shells that were launched against poorly armed and virtually defenceless ‘tribal peoples’ that left tens of thousands dead, maimed, ruined, and destitute, this, merely to save their souls in a nebulous afterlife here on earth, in heaven, or anywhere else.

Were these justifications enough for the trauma brought to thousands of men, women and children who were displaced, made destitute, robbed, humiliated, arrested, imprisoned in their own homeland, maimed or killed? Was war the best means by which the white man, invoking the example and injunctions conveyed by the humility of Jesus Christ himself and his death on the Cross, sought to ‘civilize’ the ‘native’, the poor, the hungry farmer, and the country petty trader, anxious to protect his markets and his trade routes that enabled him eke out the wherewithal for the sustenance and survival of his humble family?

Imperial Dominance ….and Arrogance

From the perspective of the Igbo peoples themselves, the real reasons lay elsewhere and these constitute one of the principal thrusts of this work which, history and the records have since judged and confirmed to be correct: namely dominance of an African people by a European race. They saw the white man’s coming as ‘evil, dangerous, and morally dubious’, with connotations of arrogance intended to enhance his imperial posture.

A second reason seen by the Igbo peoples of the period, of course, was the potential threat to British interests posed by the German Kaiser in the Kamerun. The Germans had strongly reinforced their presence in that territory which they had held as a ‘protectorate’ since 1884, aligning its laws, its administration, and commercial activities, with those obtaining in the German homeland. The markets of the Kamerun, incredibly, were already a stamping ground for long-distance traders from the Igbo interior. Records at Nkwerre show that German wine jars, textile materials, gunpowder, older versions of Mauser rifles, muskets, etc. were available, not only on the coastal polities of the Niger Delta, but also in some regional markets in Igboland, especially, the great Agbagwu market at Uzuakoli, as well as at the Uburu market in the Afikpo district.