Mar 12, 2018 - The Context of Kingship in Urhobo Culture and Its Rise in Agbon ..... ties swayed the support of important chieftains behind their preferred ...
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The Life and Times of
HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje, Ovie of Agbon, Urhoboland, Nigeria. A Review Essay
Book reviewed:
By Peter P. Ekeh UHS President
Biography of His Royal Majesty Ogurime-Rime Chamberlain Orovwuje, Okpara I, Ovie of Agbon Kingdom by Onigu Otite. Ibadan: Gold Press Limited. First Published 2016. Professor Onigu Otite’s biography of the first Ovie -- that is, first King -- of Agbon should be hailed for at least four good reasons. First, it is a pioneering venture which opens up a new way of assessing Urhobo heroes by documenting their deeds and achievements. Sadly, it is the case that we Urhobo people are skilled in singing and telling about our past heroes in verbal crafts, without corresponding attempts to preserve their memories in written forms. We pray that following Onigu Otite’s 1
excellent example in this book, many other Urhobo scholars will rise up and chronicle the good works of our traditional rulers in documents, such as books of biographies, which can be preserved in libraries and archives all over the world. Second, Onigu Otite’s efforts in this book harbor a potential for opening up another avenue of benefits for a good amount of scholarship in Urhobo studies. The Ovie of Agbon, who bore the formidable moniker of Ogurime-Rime, enjoys an uncommon record of longevity on the throne. Ruling and reigning from 1958 to 2012, HRM Orovwuje’s nearly fifty-five years on the throne have not been rivalled in the annals of kingship in Urhoboland. Having overcome nasty initial obstacles in his reign, the first Ovie of Agbon’s tenure was complex. Such complexity requires exploration from several scholarly angles – anthropological, sociological and historical. Happily, Otite’s smart and insightful book is an excellent beginning that will, in all probability, instigate several other investigations on the life and times of the premier Ogurime-Rime. Third, Onigu Otite’s illuminating examination of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje is also, by and large, a dissertation on Agbon folkways. Although Agbon is a significant fragment of the Urhobo cultural whole, little has been written on its history, culture, and geography. Otite’s book provides several good leads on how to go about the business of the scholarly study of Agbon. It certainly does well in laying out an outline of Agbon’s political culture. Fourth, Onigu Otite has offered in this well-nuanced biography of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje an invaluable Urhobo context which allows us to interpret the life and times of this preeminent king in the idioms and thought processes of the Urhobo people. Here, I must remind readers of this review that Professor Onigu Otite is a pioneer in Urhobo scholarship and that he has opened up several fertile fields in Urhobo studies. Onigu Otite has certainly enriched the biography of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje by invoking comparative insights from the wealth of the collective knowledge and practices of kingship among the Urhobo people. Having laid out those overarching benefits of this sprightly biography of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje, we must now turn to the interior details of the book’s fourteen chapters for an examination of its particular strengths as well as its patches of weaknesses and difficulties. These fourteen chapters can be usefully sorted into two distinct categories. Firstly, the first three chapters provide a context 2
for our understanding of the high culture of kingship in Agbon and in Urhoboland. In my view, this section requires a detailed discussion and expansion, well beyond the context that is offered in this book. The important reason for such an extension is that any judgement on the major difficulties that HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje encountered in his reign and any reasoned evaluation of the remarkable achievements of his kingship can only be arrived at against the background and context from which his kingdom was fabricated. Secondly, in the rest of his biography of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje, that is, in its final eleven chapters, Onigu Otite offers a blow-by-blow account of the king’s life experiences – from the circumstances of his birth and childhood, through his youth and education, unto a magnificent tenure of royalty from which he contributed enormously to Agbon society and to Urhobo’s high culture. In these chapters, Onigu Otite was at his best. I will now proceed to consider these two sections of this biography separately, one after the other. The Context of Kingship in Urhobo Culture and Its Rise in Agbon Professor Onigu Otite begins his book by tackling two constructs that have dominated modern Urhobo affairs: kingship and kingdom. Although his discussion of these two related terms cites many examples from the general anthropological literature on traditional rulership and although it does illustrate their uses with more concrete instances of kingdoms in places far from Urhoboland, there are scant references to any history of kingship in Urhoboland in Otite’s examination of the concepts kingship and kingdom. What he tells us in this regard is this: “In Urhoboland, a king is generally called Ovie . . . . In 2016, we had twenty four kings and kingdoms in Urhoboland” (p. 7). There is thus no historical context that would help us to interpret the rise of these twenty four kingdoms. An unwary reader of Otite’s book may be misled to conclude that kingdoms have been a commonplace experience in Urhobo history for centuries. An earlier publication on the idea of kingdoms does provide a larger canvas for an assessment of the scope of kingdoms in ancient Urhobo history. In 1997, HRM Adjara III (King of Ogor) and A. Omokri published their consequential book on 3
Urhobo political systems titled Urhobo Kingdoms: Political and Social Systems. This is how the late Professor F. M. A. Ukoli sketched the rise of the term “kingdoms” in modern Urhobo culture in relationship to that book: The Urhobo constitute an ethnic group, but there is great diversity . . . in their culture. Indeed, the differences are so marked that H.R.H Adjara III and Omokri, in their recent book Urhobo Kingdoms, elevate the 22 clans which constitute the entire Urhobo tribe to the status of kingdoms (Ukoli 2007: 647). It is from HRM Adjara III’s coinage of the term “kingdoms” in 1997 that the recent outbreak of the use – and overuse – of kingdoms has arisen in Urhobo’s high culture. Professor Onigu Otite himself published a seminal book in 1973 on the Okpe people in which he employed the term “kingdom” to characterize their political system. However, the term was not broadened to the whole of Urhobo nor was there any widespread adoption of the use of “kingdoms” from Otite’s (1973) Autonomy and Dependence. The Urhobo Kingdom of Okpe in Modern Nigeria, as did happen following the publication of HRM Adjara III’s (1997) Urhobo Kingdoms. From an historical perspective, there appears to be a false assumption embedded in the widespread adoption of kingdoms in the last two decades of Urhobo public affairs. Having replaced “clans” with “kingdoms”, we seem to have assumed incorrectly that kingship had a pervasive presence in Urhobo history or that a majority of the Urhobo people were infatuated with kingship. That was not the case. What was true was that the capacity to have a king – that is, an Ovie -- was an attribute of each of the twenty-two original subcultures or clans in Urhoboland. Despite that inherent property, few subcultures or clans exercised that option before the 1950s. When British colonial rulers arrived in Urhoboland in 1900, following the settlement and termination of the surrogacy claims of Royal Niger Company, there were three active kingdoms in Urhobo territories. All three of them – Ogor, Ughelli, and Agbarha – were related one to another and were geographically close together as members of the Ọghwoghwa group of subcultures. Ogor and Ughelli had welldeveloped rules of succession whereby the first male child of the reigning king 4
attains the throne upon his father’s demise. Agbarha had a unique system of triple kingship in which each of the three divisions of Agbarha was ruled by an Ovie. In addition to these three instances of kingship in Ọghwoghwa territory, Okpe in northern Urhobo had also experimented with kingship in the past. The Okpe had an historic instance of monarchy that went awry, terminating in dreadful regicide. Thereafter the Okpe were reluctant to revive the institution of kingship, until 1945 under British colonial rule, centuries afterwards. It is important to add that all of these four polities – Ogor, Ughelli, Agbarha, and Okpe --had developed strong monarchical political cultures that have sustained healthy regimes of kingship. Elsewhere in Urhoboland, there were varying attitudes about kingship. In at least one instance -- that of Agbon, neighbour to Okpe in northern Urhobo -- there was manifest hostility to kingship, at least until the 1950s. To that contrast, so important for weighing the historical import of bringing kingship to Agbon in the 1950s, we must now turn. Anti-Royalist Sentiments in Agbon Agbon and Okpe have been neighbours that are close rivals in terms of the size of their indigenous populations but also in terms of the extent of their geographical spread, both of them bordering on the Ethiope River in northern Urhobo. However, their political cultures were remarkably different. The Okpe people developed a kingship system, a monarchy, which Agbon people rejected and even despised, for centuries well into the decade of the 1950s. The core Agbon attitude towards kingship was enshrined in an age-old adage: Okpako r’ Agbon oy’ Ovie r’ Agbon. This is a saying to which Onigu Otite paid considerable attention in his interpretation of how kingship finally was received into Agbon political culture. This is how Otite approached the matter in his biography of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje under review: Okpako r’ Agbon oye Ovie r’ Agbon. This statement means that the eldest man in Agbon is the King of Agbon (p. 11). 5
Otite’s transliteration of this proverb barely scratches at its irony and cleverness. Since Agbon people had no King and since their eldest man was in fact not a king, its literary meaning was vacuous. In fact, the strength and appeal of this adage lay in its metaphorical meaning: Okpako r’ Agbon oy’ Ovie r’ Agbon is an ironic statement that mocks the political practice of kingship against which Agbon people offered the wisdom of rule by elders. Up to the 1940s and mid-1950s, the invocation of this maxim in Agbon -- which was common in any gatherings from village to town councils -- was usually accompanied with a rebuke of kingship conveyed in stories of the wickedness of kings in ancient Okpe and even Benin. So, how then did kingship come to Agbon? In his book under review, Onigu Otite offers an apparently attractive interpretation, as follows (at page 13): It may be argued that whereas we can say that the intervention of the mperial colonial government destroyed our customs and sociocultural practices . . ., it nevertheless helped to create peaceful conditions [that] promote[d] a return to some of the old structures. For Agbon people, they realised their continued oneness and their common aspirations as one people. And in the 1950s, united demands and processes were begun to rebuild Agbon, this time as a political kingdom in the light of modern organisation fostered by British Colonial Government. It was during this period that a king, an Ovie, was installed with power and jurisdiction over the pre-colonial six town units of Agbon. This is a complicated statement whose claims are partly correct but also partly misleading. Before elaborating on these views, let me establish two important points. First, Agbon people did not on their own initiate the choice of kingship; it was instigated from the outside, from the Action Government of Western Nigeria. Second, the introduction of kingship into Agbon caused unwonted turmoil in Agbon communities in the second half of the 1950s.
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Introduction of Kingship into Agbon and Its Turmoil There are two cogent reasons why we should sketch the events that accompanied the introduction of kingship into Agbon in the late 1950s. Firstly, they occurred over fifty years ago; we should retrieve its history, so that its essence and themes do not get lost. Secondly, the achievements of unity and reconciliation in Agbon can only be fathomed when they are measured against the deep and unusual elements of discord that a young Ovie had to solve against great odds. As Onigu Otite has demonstrated in the passage from his book cited above, it is useful to establish a context of British colonial rule for the events that brought about kingship in Agbon in the 1950s. Beginning with ”The Ibadan All-Nigerian Constitutional Conference of 1950,” the entire decade of the 1950s was what political scientists have labelled Decolonisation Decade in which British colonial rulers transferred powers in domestic affairs to Nigerian rulers – allowing Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group to capture power in Western Nigeria in which the Urhobo people were placed. However, the Urhobo people rejected the Action Group, with Nnamdi Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC) sweeping the polls in Urhoboland. As Okoi Arikpo (1967) shows in his early book The Development of Modern Nigeria, by 1954 a federal system, which granted substantial powers on policy matters to the Regions, had emerged. One of the earliest uses of such powers on policy matters by Awolowo’s Action Group Government of Western Nigeria was the introduction of kingship into Urhobo affairs -- a policy that was clearly motivated by a desire of the Action Group to gain a foothold in Urhobo politics. By 1955, Agbon and Oghara were tempted into the volatile game of candidacy for kingship in their respective domains. In my view, there are two major defects in Otite’s narrative of the tumultuous events in the contest for kingship in Agbon in the 1950s. Firstly, Otite’s starting year for his narration was 1958, thus ignoring the intense and poisonous environment of the first two or three years of the dispute between Okpara and Uhwokori over whose candidate should ascend the throne of the new Agbon kingship. Second, Otite’s narration minimizes – even discards – the pivotal role played by Chief George Oyibocha Orovwuje, HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje’s father. Quite early in the contest, two attractive and charismatic candidates for the newly proclaimed office of the Ovie – that is, King -- of Agbon emerged. Chief George Orovwuje, said to be born in about 1897, was a well-educated and prominent chief from Okpara. He was the only educated chief in Okpara and was well-known for 7
encouraging educational development in Okpara. From Uhwokori, Agbon’s main market town and Okpara’s rival for centuries, emerged another well-qualified candidate: Chief Sunday Odje. Sunday Odje entered Edo College in 1939, or thereabout, and completed his secondary school education in the mid-1940s after which he served in Customs and Excise Department of the British Colonial Government. These were rare achievements in Agbon in those dreary British Colonial Times. From the beginning of the contest, the campaign on the two sides was vigorous. Okpara’s claim was that because Okpara was the eldest son of Agbon, an Okpara’s descendant should ascend the new throne on the grounds that the ancient Agbon maxim -- Okpako r’ Agbon oy’ Ovie r’ Agbon – endows Okpara’s candidate with the right to the throne. Uhwokori’s argument was that its candidate had the most royal credentials, having hailed from an aristocratic heritage – Ekru r’ Ivie – in Uhwokori. Some three years into this contest, with the issues still unresolved, Okpara’s candidate, Chief George Orovwuje, took gravely ill. Okpara decided to change its candidate, choosing Chamberlain, the second son of Chief George Orovwuje, to replace him. Uhwokori then argued that Okpara had exhausted its chance and could not change its candidate. Uhwokori argued that it was now its turn to produce a rightful candidate. But it was Okpara’s views that prevailed. Meanwhile, the turmoil, which engulfed the introduction of kingship into Agbon political culture, festered deeply. It resulted in divisions and tensions not only among Agbon’s six town units but also within each of them -- as Agbon indigenes took sides in the contentious choice between Okpara and Uhwokori on the matter of whose candidate should be the first king of Agbon. Although there was nearunanimity in Okpara that its candidate should occupy the Agbon throne, there were a number of instances of Okpara indigenes who supported the Uhwokori candidate, Chief Sunday Odje. Perhaps the most notable of such dissenters in Okpara was a prominent merchant, Chief Ohwoevwo Ebojoh, who happened to be – from his maternal ties in Uhwokori -- a close relative of Chief Sunday Odje. In Uhwokori, despite an overwhelming backing for Uhwokori’s candidate, the strong support from Chief Obodo Emanuwa for the Okpara candidate, Chief George Orovwuje and (later) his son Chamberlain Orovwuje, was consequential for resolving the dispute. Remarkably, Obodo’s support for the Okpara candidate flowed from the fact that his mother, Madam Irese – an influential woman in Uhwokori -- had deep kinship ties in Igbere Street of Okpara.
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Elsewhere in other Agbon towns, the ensuing kingship crisis spread its pains in significant ways. Thus, although Ovu people were largely supportive of the Okpara candidate, the strong backing for the Uhwokori candidate by Chief Ogbe Urevwu, a prominent Ovu chieftain, caused considerable dissension. Again, it was noteworthy that Chief Ogbe Urevwu’s mother hailed from Uhwokori. Whereas the elders in Orhoakpor supported Okpara, its most prominent personality, Chief Sowho, threw his support behind the Uhwokori candidate. Sowho’s maternal ties were in Uhwokori. Similarly, Eku chieftains were sharply divided in their choices. While Chief Uvieghara, who was partly from Okpara, backed the Okpara candidate, Chief Okene and Chief James Edewor supported the Uhwokori candidate. Again, remarkably, Chief James Edewor’s mother hailed from Samagidi in Uhwokori. Thus, a main factor that determined preferences for the candidates tended to be kinship ties, not some high-minded definitions of the candidates’ qualifications for kingship. Both in Okpara and Uhwokori, as well as in other Agbon towns, maternal ties swayed the support of important chieftains behind their preferred candidate. In the end, the selection of the first Ovie of Agbon in 1958 followed from neither a judicial process nor from the logic of historical antecedents. The choice of Chamberlain Orovwuje, a 23-year old student of St. Thomas’s Teacher Training College at Ibusa, was by and large the wish of the Action Group Government of Western Nigeria. HRM Orovwuje gladly pointed to that fact when he received Chief Obafemi Awolowo to his Palace in January 1981, twenty-three years afterwards. Ogurime-Rime happily told Chief Awolowo: It affords me great pleasure to play host to you . . . . I regard your visit here this afternoon as welcomed and epoch making. It brings to mind the decisive role your government of Western Nigeria played to unravel the Agbon chieftaincy tangle in the late fifties (p. 123). The debris and wounds left behind by his elders were now the responsibility of a young man who was pressured to abandon his studies and answer the call of his hometown to become the first King of Agbon.
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HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje’s Ascent to the Agbon Throne and the Burden of Office The Reluctant Candidate for Kingship Most successful candidates for Ovie in Urhobo subcultures campaign hard for their lofty offices. That was not the case with HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje. Onigu Otite’s narrative demonstrates remarkably that he was a most reluctant candidate for kingship. Despite being informed by a powerful assembly of elders, traditional rulers and chieftains of Okpara and Agbon that he was Okpara’s choice to be king of Agbon (pp. 39-40), Chamberlain returned to College to give him room to ponder this onerous offer – deliberately avoiding his uncle who had brought him home to the meeting “because he also supported the idea that he (Chamberlain) should, in fact, be the king” (p.41). Chamberlain did his utmost to persuade his ailing father “to offer the throne to Edward, his [elder] brother, [but] his father disagreed” (p. 41). Chamberlain Orovwuje’s reluctance to be king registered powerfully in an extraordinary meeting between him and Chief M. G. Ejaife, Urhobo’s first university graduate and the founding Principal of Urhobo College. Onigu Otite’s reporting of this memorable encounter is worth quoting: [Chamberlain Orovwuje] told Chief Ejaife that he refused to be king because he was too young and lacked the administrative experience and adequate education. He then offered to leave the position for Chief Ejaife . . . [Ejaife then] said he could not be king because the Urhobo people had collected money to send him overseas with the hope that when he returned, he would reciprocate by teaching Urhobo youths at Urhobo College. He convinced Chamberlain to accept the position of king (p. 44). It is worth probing what underlay Chamberlain Orovwuje’s reluctance to become king in 1958 and to ask whether it was ultimately helpful. First of all, his reluctance showed that he was weighing the responsibility of kingship in a community that never had a king before his time. Such forethought boded well for the new kingdom’s future prospects. An inane and thoughtless youth would have, in all probability, ruined Agbon people’s faith in a monarchy. Chamberlain Orovwuje’s reluctance also probably reflected his generation’s scepticism and apathy towards kingship in Agbon. As it turned out, HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje made kingship appealing and even glamorous to a later generation of Agbon youths. His own generation of Agbon youths had been raised 10
in a cultural milieu suffused in folk stories of the wicked ways of oppressive kings. It is remarkable that there was no whiff of oppression by him of ordinary people or his chiefs during his long reign of more than a half-century. It was also probably the case that Chamberlain Orovwuje’s source of reluctance was more personal than those high-minded reasons sketched above. By 1958, as he reminded us at several points in Otite’s biography of the king, Chamberlain was a pious youth who was seriously contemplating going into a Catholic Seminary to train for priesthood. In 1958, kingship in Urhobo culture was incompatible with pure Christian tenets. Unlike the prevailing circumstances in the 1950s, kingship in Urhoboland in modern times has virtually been transformed into a Christian institution. It was entirely possible that Chamberlain Orovwuje was bothered by what kingship would do to his personal faith. It is remarkable that the beloved King was administered the last Christian rites in his final hours on earth. A Matter of Character: The Virtues That Sustained HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje At an improbable age of twenty-three years, HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje became King of Agbon, an Urhobo community that had no previous history of kingship. He was thus thrust into a high-stakes game of public affairs that had been fouled up by divisions in all Agbon towns and villages on the introduction of kingship into Agbon culture. He became King when he was still unmarried. He lost the counsel of his influential father who died in 1962. Faced with these great odds, it would be difficult to foresee a wholesome future for the new Agbon kingdom. Yet under HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje’s peaceful reign of more than half a century, Agbon flourished and was praised by the Urhobo people as a model of what an Urhobo kingdom should be. What enabled HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje to score such spectacular success in his tenure as Ovie of Agbon? In my view, it was a matter of personal character. Two old-fashioned virtues impelled and guided HRM Orovwuje’s career as Ovie of Agbon: these were patriotism and bravery. These ideals were instilled into youths in traditional Agbon communities. The young king polished them up and ably employed them as tools in his unrelenting efforts to solve the daunting problems that faced his people. HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje was an Urhobo patriot. As Onigu Otite reports in his biography of the King, he was already passionate about Urhobo affairs as a student at Agbor and Ibusa in the mid-1950s, before he became king. The Ovie carried that 11
passion forward into his work as King of Agbon. HRM Orovwuje regarded the process of reconciliation and the resulting unity in Agbon as a necessary means towards the end of overcoming local pettiness and of moving Agbon affairs forward for the greater good of the Urhobo nation. That is to say, despite his youth at the time of his ascent to the throne of Agbon kingdom, HRM Orovwuje had a vision for the greatness of the Urhobo nation, beginning with the progress of Agbon people. Such was the scale and scope of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje’s patriotism. There was another virtue that enabled HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje to survive and succeed as Agbon’s new king. He was a brave man. I do not make this statement lightly. HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje had an amount of daring and risk-taking that were characteristic of decisive and brave leaders. His life career was laced with numerous instances of bravery. Let me give two examples of his bravery that the king’s hometown people of Okpara will readily recall and appreciate. My first example relates to the history of Okpara’s expansion. Up to the 1930s, to the left of the road leading to Isiokolo – where Ejaife Primary School and the Catholic Mission as well as the King’s Palace now occupy – was a huge area of Okpara known as Aghwarode, Okpara’s “Forbidden Bush.” It was into this dreaded “Forbidden Bush’’ that those who died unnaturally were thrown without proper burial rites and ceremonies; these included women who died in childbirth and men and women who died from committing abominations and infractions that were deemed unforgivable. In the mid-1930s, an Irish missionary, Fr. Patrick Kelly, surprised Okpara’s rulers by choosing a portion of the “Forbidden Bush” as the site of Catholic School and Mission. Until the late 1950s, that Catholic School (renamed Ejaife Primary School) and the Catholic Mission shared boundaries with the remaining areas of Aghwarode. When, however, the new King was going to build a Palace in Okpara, he made the daring choice of invading the “Forbidden Bush’’ by locating the Palace next to the Catholic School and Mission. Today, the “Forbidden Bush’’ has disappeared from Okpara’s landscape – thanks in large measure to the daring and fearlessness of Bishop P. J. Kelly in the 1930s and HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje in the 1950s-1960s. My second example of HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje’s act of courage is also part of Okpara’s historical lore. Sometime during his reign, while he was still in his middle years, a group of assassins gained access to the Okpara Palace, on a mission to slay HRM Orovwuje. The assassins obviously underestimated the king. Joined by his wife in this deadly encounter with merciless killers, the Ovie of Agbon fought valiantly against the invaders. According to one account of this episode, the Ogurime-Rime snatched a gun from one of the assassins, drawing blood from one 12
of the wicked hoodlums. Overpowered and confused, the wretched would-be assassins took to their heels and fled in terror. Okpara youth followed the assassins in hot pursuit but they managed to escape. I daresay, this is an act of bravery that deserves to feature prominently in any annals of kingship in Urhoboland. HRM’s Chamberlain Orovwuje’s Kingship and the Development of Agbon HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje became the Ovie of Agbon in 1958 during British Colonial Times. He reigned and ruled until the time of his death in 2012, half a century after Nigeria’s independence from Great Britain’s colonial rule. Between these dates Nigeria experienced transformative social change, a good amount of which reached Agbon Kingdom under the resourceful leadership of the first King of Agbon, Okpara I. In many ways, HRM Orovwuje’s kingship was an agency for the development of Agbon. To point to one vital area of development that was dear to the King’s heart, there was not a single secondary school in Agbon at the time of HRM Orovwuje’s installation as Ovie of Agbon in 1958. By mid-way point of his reign, every town in Agbon could boast of having at least one secondary school in its environs. Professor Onigu Otite, the king’s biographer, has listed the various colleges whose founding HRM Orovwuje directly facilitated: Agbon Girls’ Grammar School, Okpara Inland; St. Kevin’s College, Uhwokori; Okpara Boys’ Grammar School, Okpara Inland; Colleges at Otorho r’ Agbon and Orhoakpor, etc. (pp. 84-85). Onigu Otite further credits several other categories of development that came to Agbon during HRM Orovwuje’s reign to his intervention and facilitation. These include: (i) pipe-borne water supply; (ii) electricity supply; and (iii) motorable and tarred roads. It is important to underscore the point that none of these items of development were available in Agbon during British Colonial Times. Indeed, about the only item of development in Agbon, outside of scattered elementary schools and modern schools, was the Baptist Hospital at Eku that was founded in the 1940s. The addition of the Catholic Hospital in Okpara Inland in 1962 was made possible with the active participation and intervention of HRM Orovwuje. Apart from such items of development that were facilitated by the king, there was a separate category of development in Agbon that should be attributed to HRM Orovwuje’s own creativity and his own making. Onigu Otite sums up this point quite cogently:
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One of the most important achievements of Okpara I, JP, was the creation and maintenance of peace throughout [Agbon] kingdom. He was a peace-loving king. He hated quarrels and [he] resolved conflicts between individuals and town units (p. 83). Otite cites, as an example of the king’s peace-making efforts, “his intervention in settling the crisis between Uhwokori and Samagidi. He organised six chefs to assist him in the assessment of the worsening situation” (p. 88). Otite notes in his biography of the king that the incidents of communal conflicts were drastically reduced during HRM Orovwuje’s reign. There is a healthy and striking result of this peaceful environment that HRM Orovwuje helped to create in Agbon. This is with regard to indigenous towns in Urhoboland, by which we mean urban settlements that are wholly peopled by their own indigenes. According to this definition, the two largest indigenous Urhobo towns – in geographical spread and population size – are without any doubt Okpara Inland and Uhwokori. Their phenomenal growth, particularly in the post-Civil War years, has been enabled by the peaceful environment in Agbon during the Orovwuje era. There are two more areas of Agbon’s development that owe their existence to HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje’s creative intervention. Firstly, by the sheer ingenuity of creating chieftaincy titles and distributing them fairly and evenly to Agbon elites, including women, from all its constituent zones, there has been a remarkable surge in Agbon consciousness and pride at home and in the sprawling Agbon diaspora in Europe and America. Secondly, there is a significant region of Agbon’s development where OgurimeRime Chamberlain Orovwuje has left his indelible imprint by employing his full determination and rugged will-power in the struggle for it. HRM Orovwuje fought like a lion in order to ensure that Agbon had its own Local Government with its Headquarters at Isiokolo, that is, Otorho r’ Agbon. Yes, HRM Chamberlain Orovwuje deserves the title of FATHER OF ETHIOPE EAST LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA. Peter Ekeh UHS President March 12, 2018 14
EFERENCES Adjara III, H.R.H., O.I. and Omokri, A. 1997. Urhobo Kingdoms: Political and Social Systems. Textflow Ltd., Ibadan. Arikpo, Okoi (1967) The Development of Modern Nigeria. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, Inc. Ekeh, Peter P. (2008) “On the Matter of Clans and Kingdoms in Urhobo History and Culture.” Culled from http://www.waado.org/Organizations/UPU/president_general_reception_abuja/l ectures/clans_kingdoms_ekeh.htm. Otite O.1973. Autonomy and Dependence. The Urhobo Kingdom of Okpe in Modern Nigeria. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Ukoli, F. M. A. 1998 [As reprinted in 2007] “The Place of the Elite in Urhobo Leadership.” Pp 647-656 in Peter P. Ekeh, editor, History of the Urhobo People of Niger Delta. Lagos: Urhobo Historical Society, 2007.
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