Lost history · 1949–1954
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Missionaries gave the village an insulting name that stuck. In February 1954, its young men faced down riot police over a school tax. Four of them died, and the colonial government never asked them for tax again.
Ekwunekwune is a village in Amagu Ikwo, in Ikwo Local Government Area of today's Ebonyi State. It sits in farm country, where palm bush has replaced most of the old forest, and people grow yams, cassava and cocoyams in the long rainy season.
The name has a lovely story behind it. A retired headmaster from the village, John O. Nwakpuru, told the historian who wrote this account that the place was once a thick forest so full of egg-laying birds that women could pick eggs from the nests into baskets and carry them home for dinner. The ancestors were so amazed by all the birds and nests that they called the forest Ekwunekwune. According to oral accounts, it was a man named Erim Ogwudu, one of the founders of this part of Ikwo, who crossed a small creek with his men, drove out a Cross River group called the Ekpete, and gave the forest its name.
Then outsiders arrived and changed it. In the mid-1940s, Catholic missionaries came over from Calabar. The people resisted them by force, and the missionaries went back. In 1949 a second mission came, Scottish Presbyterians guided by Igbo converts from Onitsha, Awka, Afikpo and Ohafia, riding bicycles into the village. They camped at Mgboabor, but between the hostile villagers and the mosquitoes they soon moved to a neighbouring village and visited from there. It was these missionaries who mangled the name into "Akunakuna", which the author says is an insulting word in Igbo, the kind of name you would never choose for your own home. It stuck. Many people still know the place by it.
Where the missionaries went, government followed. A government primary school came to the village around 1950, and with it the first real push to bring the people under direct colonial control. As Nwakpuru put it, his people had lived apart for many years, and the missionaries, though resisted, simply refused to leave them alone.
Direct tax came to this part of Nigeria in 1928. People in Abakaliki first met British rule in a harsher form, when thousands of young men were made to build houses and offices for the colonial officials in Abakaliki town. Then came native courts and warrant chiefs, local men picked to collect tax, who soon became corrupt and high-handed.
The Ikwo were used to running things their own way. Decisions on shared matters were made openly in the village square, with all adult men present. Cornelius Alobu, Ekwunekwune's first indigenous councillor, told the researcher that the real problem was that people were never asked. A tax decided by strangers, and taken from hard-earned money, was always going to cause trouble.
In 1953 the government added an education rate, a tax to pay for schools. In Ekwunekwune many people had no interest in Western schooling at all, so this felt like paying for something they never wanted. Men who could not pay were thrown into prison. Others ran off to hide in their farms and in the forest. Families broke apart.
The women moved first. Led by a woman named Usulor Enyi Mbgaji and others across Abakaliki Division, they rounded up chiefs and tax agents, brought them to Eke Imoha, and beat and humiliated them in public. Ekwunekwune women were part of it. And the men watched, and made up their minds.
When court messengers and police came to arrest people for blocking the education rate, they could not make a single arrest. So on 25 February 1954, the Senior District Officer came himself, with councillors from Ikwo and some police, to talk the men round. He was snubbed. On the way back to Abakaliki his party was ambushed, and the two Ikwo councillors and other government staff were taken captive.
The next day the officials returned with senior police officers and two riot police units from Enugu. They met the village at the Edukwu playground. The elders, the Nde Ichie, sat in the front row. Behind them stood the young men, holding cutlasses, ready to fight.
The Senior District Officer said he would not leave without the captives. To the village, that sounded like a threat to the whole community. Then something remarkable happened. The elders quietly moved to the back, and the young men with their cutlasses surged forward and surrounded the government team. The police used batons and canisters. The young men picked up the canisters and threw them back.
In the confusion, a Senior Superintendent of Police fired his revolver and killed a young man on the spot. More shots followed. Two more young men were killed, and a third was so badly wounded that he died soon after. About 28 people from the village were arrested and tried before a British magistrate in Abakaliki.
Villagers later said many of the visitors were killed too. The Chief Secretary's report said nothing of that, but it described "a regrettable degree of savagery", and noted that the police had never in this country met "such a determined and well organized attack".
Then came the strangest result of all. After those two days, nobody came back to ask Ekwunekwune to pay direct tax, the education rate, or any other tax. To the village, that was a victory.
