The Ekpeye (Akpaohia) are a people in southeastern Nigeria with a distinct culture and rulers of a former kingdom. The Ekpeye are usually included as a subgroup of the Igbo people on linguistic and cultural grounds. They speak an Igboid language. Ekpeye people living in the Ahoada (Ahuda) and Ogba-Egbema areas of Rivers State in Nigeria were a population of 80,000 (1991 census), that has increased 63% to approximately 130,000, according to the 2006 census estimates.

History

The Ekpeye have long lived in the land bounded by River Orashi in the West and River Sombreiro in the East; starting out at the northern end from about 3000 BC. Archaeological work showed a steady and very consistent southward movement of the Igbo people, resulting in about AD 1000 in a large settlement mainly at the central geographically elevated area now called Akoh (Dry Land) and Egi. The rise and Expansion of the Benin Kingdom in the following centuries, forced Igbo-speaking but Benin culture-bearing populations down the Niger river into then Ekpeyeland. A socio-political crisis resulted.

A minority of the Ekpeye, who sided with the Benin cultured Igbo immigrants, moved away up north and founded what is now Ogba land, whose language plainly bears the inprints of the Ekpeye and Igbo languages. The commonest historical tale in Ogba and Ekpeye today, is that both are "the sons of one father born of different mothers". At about 1542 AD, during the reign of Oba Awuarre of Benin, when the Benin kingdom was at its most glorious and its culture at its most widespread, Ogba, which majority were Benin-cultured, created the theory that its Progeneitor was a Prince of Benin. They gave his name as ‘Akalaka’, which noticeably, does not match any personality mentioned in Benin Histories. The man known today as the father of Ekpeye and Ogba is now held by some historians to have left Benin kingdom due to infighting within the royal family; to have fled with his family, amidst rumors of his inevitable demise for his disloyalty to the Oba. That they moved southwards, following the River Niger, eventually settling along the Orashi River (in current day Ubie in Ekpeyeland, southeastern Nigeria).

Source

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