History of the Ijaw (Ijo) People

The people widely known in English as the Ijaw (also written Ijo) call themselves Izon. The commonly repeated explanation is that "Ijaw" arose as an outsider's rendering of "Izon". Today Ijaw communities live principally in Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta States, with smaller populations in Ondo, Edo, Akwa Ibom, Abia and Ogun States, and long-standing Ijaw fishing settlements as far afield as other parts of the West African coast.

Population estimates vary widely and should be treated with caution. Reference works place the Ijaw among Nigeria's larger ethnic groups, but published figures range from around two million to figures many times higher, depending on who is counted and how.

Uncertain or disputed
There is no single agreed population figure for the Ijaw. Different sources use different definitions and different census years, and the results are not comparable.

Origins and settlement

Scholars working from linguistic and archaeological evidence suggest that speakers of Ijo languages have been settled in the Niger Delta for a very long time — one widely cited estimate is several thousand years. This is an inference drawn from language and material evidence rather than a documented migration with dates and names, and it should be read as such.

Popular accounts give more specific origin stories, naming places of departure and founding ancestors. Those accounts belong to oral tradition; we have not reproduced any of them here, because we have not been able to attribute them to a named community or source. Families who hold such an account are invited to contribute it so it can be recorded as oral tradition.

Language

The Ijo languages are usually grouped together as "Ijoid", traditionally treated as a small and early-branching part of the wider Niger-Congo family. This classification is not settled: some linguists have argued that features of Ijoid — including its subject-object-verb word order and the absence of the noun-class systems typical of Niger-Congo — are reason to treat Ijoid as a family in its own right.

Varieties within the group include Izon (Kolokuma), Nembe, Kalabari, Akassa, Ibani, Nkoroo, Biseni, Okodia and Oruma, alongside the separate and severely endangered Defaka language.

Clans, city-states and trade

The Ijaw were never politically unified as a single kingdom. Historically they were organised into a large number of ibe, usually translated as clans — one frequently cited figure is around forty-three. In the central delta, political life was largely village-based. In the eastern delta, island communities such as Nembe (Brass), Bonny and Kalabari developed into powerful trading city-states.

From the fifteenth century onwards those city-states traded with European merchants — Portuguese first, later British — initially in enslaved people and subsequently in palm oil. The traditional rulers of Nembe hold the title Amanyanabo. Christian missionaries reached Ogbolomabiri in 1867, and after 1884 the area fell within the British-claimed Oil Rivers Protectorate.

Uncertain or disputed
The founding date of Nembe Kingdom is not documented. Oral tradition names a king reigning around 1639, but this is tradition, not a recorded date.

Belief

Ijaw people today are described in reference works as predominantly Christian, with a minority holding to traditional religion and a small Muslim population. We have not reproduced percentage figures, because the published ones are not consistent with one another.

Egbesu is an Ijaw deity and associated body of thought, discussed in the scholarly literature as, among other things, a philosophy governing when force is justified. From the 1990s it was taken up and reinterpreted by Ijaw youth movements during the conflicts over oil in the Niger Delta. Beliefs about spiritual protection attached to Egbesu in that period are matters of faith and reported practice, not of empirical record.