Owerri

Owerri grew from a group of Igbo farming and trading communities on the Otamiri River. Like most of Igboland it had no king: authority rested with lineage heads, elders and title societies, and the traditional rulers recognised in the city today belong to a later, colonial-era pattern of appointed chiefs. The British reached the area early in the twentieth century and made the settlement a divisional headquarters, adding a court, a prison and a mission station.

The town's modern significance dates from the civil war. As federal forces took Enugu and then Umuahia, the Biafran government retreated, and Owerri became the last capital of the secessionist state in late 1969. The city itself changed hands and was besieged, and much of it was damaged before the surrender in January 1970. Reconstruction was slow, and for years afterwards Owerri was a modest administrative town.

It was the creation of Imo State in 1976, with Owerri as its capital, that transformed the place. Government offices, a state university, a polytechnic at Nekede and a federal university of technology brought money, students and building work, and the New Owerri extension was laid out to the south-east. Successive state governments have left their mark in roundabouts, statues and half-finished projects. Since 2020 the city has felt the wider insecurity of the southeast, including attacks on official buildings and the Monday sit-at-home orders that periodically shut the markets.

Owerri is Igbo and Catholic, and both shape daily behaviour. Church is central: the cathedral and the parish churches fill on Sundays, and weddings, burials and child-naming ceremonies are large, expensive and carefully staged, with matching aso ebi cloth worn by family groups. Funerals in particular can draw hundreds of people back from Lagos, Abuja and abroad.

The surrounding countryside is the home of the mbari tradition, in which a community built a house full of painted clay figures — the earth goddess Ala, ancestors, animals, figures of the modern world — as an offering, then left it to weather away. The Mbari centre in the city keeps the practice visible. Masquerades, mmanwu, appear at festivals and funerals in the villages around, and the new yam festival marks the harvest. Kola nut opens any formal visit, broken and prayed over by the eldest man present.

Owerri's other reputation is for leisure. The city has an unusually large number of hotels, lounges and bars for its size, and it draws people from across the southeast for weekends, live highlife and hip hop, football on screens and long evenings over nkwobi. Title-taking, the igba boi trading apprenticeship and a strong sense of Igbo identity run through social life, as does the memory of the civil war, which is discussed openly and often.

Owerri is a medium-sized city: the three local government areas that make up Owerri were estimated at about 1.4 million people in 2016, and the built-up area has spread well beyond the old town into Nekede, Egbu and the New Owerri estates. It is young, with three large institutions of higher education, and its population swells in December.

Government is the largest employer, followed by trade, education and the hotel and hospitality business. Ekeonunwa and Relief markets handle food and goods, small workshops and shops line the main roads, and many households depend on remittances from relatives in Lagos, Abuja, South Africa, Britain and the United States. Electricity from the grid is unreliable, so generators run behind most shops and hotels, and many streets have their own boreholes.

The day starts early, with church services, school runs and market trading before the heat, and slows in the afternoon before the bars fill in the evening. Heavy rain floods low-lying roads, and gully erosion is a recurring problem in the wider state. Since 2020 the Monday sit-at-home orders associated with separatist agitation have disrupted schools, markets and transport, and insecurity and the cost of living dominate conversation.

Owerri eats the Igbo kitchen of the southeast. Soups are the centre of a meal, served with a swallow — pounded yam, garri or fufu — taken by hand. Ofe onugbu, bitterleaf soup thickened with cocoyam, is the local favourite; ofe oha is made with the young leaves of the oha tree; and ofe nsala, the white soup, is a light pepper soup made without palm oil, often with catfish. Egusi, melon-seed soup, and ogbono are eaten everywhere, and one soup, ofe owerri, carries the town's own name.

The city's own speciality is bar food. Nkwobi — cow foot simmered and dressed in a thick, orange palm-oil sauce with utazi leaf — and isi ewu, the spiced goat's head served in the same sauce, are what people order in the evening, and Owerri's lounges have a reputation across the southeast for both. Abacha, shredded dried cassava tossed with palm oil, fermented oil-bean ugba, fish and vegetables, is eaten cold as an afternoon dish. Okpa, a steamed pudding of Bambara-nut flour, is a morning food, and roasted yam or plantain with pepper sauce is sold at roadside grills.

Palm wine, nkwu, tapped fresh and drunk the same day, is the ceremonial drink and is presented at weddings; kola nut accompanies it. Beer, malt drinks, the hibiscus infusion zobo and chapman, a bittersweet mixed soft drink, fill the bars.