By Williams Wodi
“If you repeat a lie often enough, People will believe it” ~JOSEPH GOEBBELS
The new information superhighway has given birth to a dedicated crop of social media warriors and digital dissidents who manufacture and post all manner of content without verification. Welcome to the weird concept now known as “citizen journalism.” Practitioners of this burst of dissent do not need any dress rehearsal to ply their heinous trade. Most of these self-motivated social media warriors and cyberspace invaders have just one purpose; and that is to create content that is deliberately designed to misinform unsuspecting people and distort history on a grand scale that was never previously imagined! These people have created so much confusion in the minds of unsuspecting media content consumers to the extent that even people who have the right version of history are occasionally led to doubt what they already know to be true.
That appears to be the case scenario in which one of our brothers innocently asked a vexingly funny question about the status of “Emeru” or “Obomotu,” otherwise known by strangers and residents in our midst as Port Harcourt. The so-called “Crown Land” now called Port Harcourt was acquired on behalf of the British Government in 1912 during the colonial era of Lord Frederick Lugard. Mr Lewis Vermon Harcourt, after whom the city was named, completed the agreement with Rebisi and other contiguous Ikwerre communities, following which it was sealed by the famous 1913 Agreement. Each time Mr Harcourt’s representatives engaged the Rebisi people to discuss the land acquisition, more nervously doubtful indigenous families joined the negotiation team to inquire about their legitimate interest—since land means everything to Ikwerre people.
On one occasion, the interpreter (a native of Okrika who spoke fractured English that enabled him to give feedback to Mr Raph Moore), reportedly exclaimed that the negotiation team was getting larger each time the parties met. He jokingly called them “Nde Ibu”, meaning that they were too many—an appellation that was corrupted to mean–“Diobu” over time; just as the white colonialists called the Cross River “Calm Bar” which was similarly corrupted to present-day “Calabar.”
It is a fact of history, Raph Moore, William Harcourt and Rebisi indigenes signed the 1913 Agreement, while one Chief Oju Daniel Kalio of Okrika signed as a witness (never mind later distortions that laughably designated the Okrikas as “co-owners” of Port Harcourt). Historically, Port Harcourt was known and called “Igwuocha” in the Ikwerre language (or the “High Cliffs”). Port Harcourt boomed after the opening of the 243-kilometre-long rail link to the Enugu coalfield in 1916.
The entire area was the undisputed farmland of the Rebisi people. Fisherfolk from Okrika and other Ijaw communities occasionally came ashore to exchange their catch for farm produce by Ikwerre farmers.
Today, Port Harcourt is about the fourth most populous city in Nigeria after Lagos, Kano and Ibadan, with an estimated urban population of almost four million dwellers—up from an estimated population of 52,752 inhabitants in 1950—a robust 4,99% annual growth rate. The unnecessary controversy over the actual “ownership” of Port Harcourt is a largely manufactured controversy by professional agitators and agent provocateurs who are hell-bent on distorting the original historical facts that could be easily obtained from the Colonial Archives in the United Kingdom—especially the famous Dispatches of the Secretary for the Colonies, Mr Lewis Harcourt, after whom the city was named.
This brief contribution is motivated by an intriguing question by one of our brothers who recently sought to know if there was a “part Rebisi of Port Harcourt” that belonged to another ethnic group. It became obvious that this brother must have become a victim of the unrelenting vile propaganda by a few of our vocal Okrika neighbours who are understandably in need of more land for settlement expansion away from their natural habitat in the wetlands where Mother Nature deliberately domiciled them. This unremitting expansionist tendency is at the root of all the tension and toxic relationship generated between the two neighbours who traded, wrestled and inter-married in the past. Adolf Hitler called it the quest for more land Lebensraum—more space in the Sudetenland which aggravated World War II.
From the brief narrative above, it is crystal clear that the whole parcel of land that is now being disputed is officially known as “Crown Land” which was surveyed and acquired from its Rebisi owners by the British colonial overlords in 1913. All that parcel of land from the beachfront, later own as Borikiri (or fishing port), right up to UTC Junction was known and called “Emeru” or “Obomotu” by its Rebisi owners. It is on record that while the relevant Rebisi families were on ground throughout the land negotiation with the colonial officials with respect to the exact areas earmarked for acquisition, there is no record of Okrika families that laid a similar claim, beyond the presence of Oju Daniel Kalio who served as a mere interpreter and “witness”; and this was because he had the rudimentary skill to act as a go-between. In one of his Dispatches, Mr. Raph Moore told Mr. Harcourt of his eagerness to promptly conclude the agreement with Diobu people “before fictitious claims would have inflated the price.” With the aid of hindsight, it has become obvious that the only unpardonable error committed by Rebisi indigenes was not to have extended their settlements to the beachhead; and agreeing to do business with the meddlesome Kalio.
Although the now “disputed” area was entirely their farmland, it was a shortsighted act for these indigenous people to confine themselves to their present overcrowded communities of Oroije, Orochiri, Ogbunabali, Elikahia, Rumuwoji, Nkpolu Oroworukwo, and the contiguous communities of Oginigba and Rumuomasi, etc. If these communities had built houses in what is today known as the Central Business District of Port Harcourt, it would have discouraged the later arrivals who pretended to be operating fishing ports.
For instance, the fishing settlements known today as Ozuboko, Fimie, Okuruama, Abuloma, etc, were thick forests with neither settlements nor permanent buildings. Yes, a few scattered fishing settlements did exist in some of these areas, but the Okrika fisherfolk promptly retreated to their actual communities across the river once their fish stock was sold or exchanged for farm produce from their generous Ikwerre neighbours in the hinterland. These areas belonged to Elikahia people, who called them “Eli Ijiji” and “Okahia”. For instance, while my late father, the Rev Canon Herbert Wodi, held court as the Vicar of St. Barnabas Anglican Church, just after the Civil War, we accompanied indigenes of Elikahia to fish and farm unmolested in the areas now claimed as “ancient Okrika communities.”
Angered by repeated encroachments and bogus claims by the Okrika settlers, the Elikahia indigenes approached a Rivers State High Court presided over by the first indigenous Chief Judge, Ambrose Alagoa (an Ijaw), who ruled the test case in favour of the appellants, describing the Okrika settlers (respondents) as “customary tenants” of their benevolent Elikahia landlords! Honourable Justice Alagoa went a step further to tell the Okrika settlers to count themselves lucky that the Elikahia people were generous enough not to have demanded that they vacate the land. “I would have readily granted such a prayer,” the Judge said. The celebrated “Ozuboko Land Case” went right up to the Supreme Court which ruled in favour of Elikahia people in 1982, to the discomfiture of their opponents. It is a shame that such a consequential order was NEVER executed by Elikahia community.
That ruling answers the question of who actually owns the entire land upon which Port Harcourt was developed! To borrow from the rabid Pentecostals: “There is no room for argument” on this issue as there is no “part” of Port Harcourt that belongs to any group, other than Rebisis Kingdom and their contiguous Oginigba and Rumuomasi neighbours.
I recall a hilarious incident in 1992, when the late Chief Monday Okonny of Abua proposed that Port Harcourt be “divided” between Okrika and Diobu “areas” for peace to reign between the two neighbours. In an impassioned response, I had reminded the venerable Chief that his indecent proposal was akin to the female impostor in the bible narrative who proposed that King Solomon “shared” the disputed child! This is what the proponents of “UTC boundary” mean each time they claim Port Harcourt township; and the painful part is that the impostors know the existential truth, but have continued to expand the myth of “joint” ownership with a new aberration known as “Port Harcourt Aborigines”. There is even the bogus and laughable title of “Amayanabo of Obomotu Ochiri” being paraded by one faceless individual in over-sized chieftaincy apparel. Can anybody beat that? It is like a group of bald men arguing over the ownership of a comb! Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels was spot on: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” Especially gullible people who forget that lies do not walk long distances because they are fitted with very short legs!
Today, the supreme irony is that the original owners of the Port Harcourt are condemned to densely populated communities with their new tenants from other parts of Nigeria, while their “customary tenants” now occupy the choicest lands in the heart of Port Harcourt and the outlying areas. Most annoying is the fact that politicians have put a new spin on the false narrative, while exploiting the falsehood to suit their pecuniary interests in this social media age in which truth is the first casualty! I would like to end by referring those who dispute the true story about the acquisition of Port to the Colonial Archives in London to pick up Mr Lewis Harcourt’s famous Dispatches to his employers on the protracted negotiations with Ikwerre people over the ownership of Port Harcourt. Better still, they should contact Eze Gideon O. Omodu of Rundele to pick up well-bound copies of the original Dispatches on the acquisition of the Crown Land to buttress the fact that “Emeru” or “Obomotu” entirely belongs to Rebisi people and their contiguous Ikwerre neighbours. The wind warns its detractors that those who dispute its existence should stand on its tempestuous path on a rainy day.
