Wealth and Poverty in West Niger Igbo Area, 1837-1979: A History of Wellbeing and Integration

Abstract

When in the 1830s the British expeditioners visited Aboh and its environs, it signified the dawn of a new era for the people in not just Aboh, but the rest of West Niger Igbo Area. With more visits, the Area was soon to become fully incorporated into the global world, materially and socio-economically. This research therefore examines the integration of West Niger Igbo Area, a sub-region of Southern Nigeria, into the national space and inter-national world, and how people in this area experienced and shaped the material changes, citizenship, and standards of wellbeing within the integrated space. The early encounters would reframe their markets and lives for the next one hundred and fifty years. Gift exchanges and sheer human curiosity were instrumental in the early processes of integration. Gifts between travellers and locals sealed relationships that birthed direct trade and mutual demands, and that reshaped the material culture and living standards in their integrated communities. In experiencing integration, material culture was a site of reconstructing the meanings of wealth, poverty, inequality, and wellbeing. On their part, the people were partners—if often unequal ones—in framing and aiding the integration of the local into the international. West Niger’s international integration was built on and sustained by local and international inequalities. The duality of these local and international inequalities facilitated the unprecedented extent by which this integration changed their material world. International inequalities included the contrast in accessible capital between the local people and European producers/traders to operate in the global and local markets, for example, as well as the terms of exchanges that defined their socio-economic relationship. Local inequalities included the consequent rewards that came with proximity to the Niger such as early access to education and job opportunities, the carried-over advantages of resource control accorded to merchants and royals from the pre- integration era, and the rights of inheritance in the face of land privatisation, for example. While material (including monetary) poverty was not a colonial invention, the international integration and subsequent colonial rule significantly expanded the nature of both material poverty and wealth, and consequently invented new indices of poverty, wealth, and wellbeing in West Niger Igboland. Given the layered nature of this integration together with its local awareness and impact, the research then looks at how this integration and events afterwards created advantaged and disadvantaged groups among the West Niger Igbo people. The categories of advantage and disadvantage were multifaceted – gendered, spatial, temporal, generational, occupational. For instance, factors like the introduction of Western education, or taxation, or land privatisation processes, each influenced the economic fortunes of different households and individuals. At the end of the day, what this research really seeks to understand is how people in a small region of Southern Nigeria would experience what it meant to become citizens of a national and global world, and how they were both actors and subjects in the unfolding history. So much of a gem also underlies this unfolding history in how two economic extremes were shaped by the changing world around them, the extremes of wealth and poverty, and everything between.