People · c. 1821–1891
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Sold as a child from Igboland, he rose to head a Bonny trading house, left to found his own kingdom, and ended up a prisoner on a British ship.
Start with a small boy in inland Igboland, around 1821. His name is usually given as Mbanaso Ozurumba, and his roots are traced to Amaigbo, in today's Imo State. Somewhere in his childhood he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Some accounts point to the Aro traders, whose networks moved captives toward the coast, though nobody can be sure. He ended up in Bonny, the great Ijaw trading port, as someone else's property.
Bonny's society was built around trading houses. A house was like a firm and a family rolled into one: a head, his relatives, and many enslaved people who paddled the canoes, carried the oil and did the business. A clever enslaved boy could rise inside a house, and this one did. In Bonny he was known as Jubo Jubogha, or Jaja. He served his master for years, earned his way out of slavery, and showed such a gift for trade that when his master died, he took over the business. Jaja became head of the Anna Pepple House.
He kept growing it. Under him, Anna Pepple absorbed other houses until it was one of the two great powers in Bonny. One observer wrote that everyone looked on Oko Jumbo, head of the rival Manilla Pepple House, and Ja Ja as the real rulers of Bonny. Two big men in one town rarely ends well. War broke out between the houses.
Jaja did something bold. Instead of fighting to the end in Bonny, he walked away and took his people with him. He moved about 26 miles east to a spot that controlled the creeks running to the inland palm-oil markets. In 1869 he founded a new state there and called it Opobo. Bonny was left on the wrong side of the trade route.
The walk-out was not as sudden as it looked. In 1868 a fire tore through Bonny and hit Jaja's Anna Pepple House hardest, and his rival Oko Jumbo saw his chance. Heavy fighting broke out on 13 September 1869. Jaja was outgunned, so he pulled back and asked for peace, and the peace talks dragged on for weeks under the British consul. That was the point. While everyone talked, he quietly moved his men and guns out. In 1870 he declared his new state independent and named it after Opubu the Great, the old Bonny king who had founded Anna House. The name worked on people's hearts: of Bonny's 18 houses, 14 followed him. Britain recognised him as king in 1873, he sent soldiers to help the British fight the Asante, and in 1875 Queen Victoria sent him a sword of honour.
Opobo boomed. Jaja shut out both European and African middlemen, so oil from the interior had to go through him. By 1870 he was selling eight thousand tons of palm oil directly to the British, and Opobo shipped straight to Liverpool. He was modern in his own way. He sent his children to school in Glasgow, and he built a secular school in Opobo and hired white teachers to staff it. But he kept Christian missionaries out of his kingdom entirely. He wanted education, not a new religion.
One of those children has a sad little footnote. His son, Prince Waribo, was sent to school in Frodsham, in Cheshire, England. He died there of a lung inflammation on 21 April 1882, aged about thirteen or fourteen. He lies in St Laurence's churchyard. The grave has no headstone, just an inscription on its edging stone, and two white arrows on the path point the way.
When Britain offered Jaja a treaty in 1884, he read it closely. There was a clause about free trade, which would have opened his waterways to British traders going inland. Jaja crossed it out before he signed. That was his whole business model, and he was not going to sign it away.
That same year, at the Berlin Conference, European powers marked Opobo down as British territory. British traders wanted to deal directly with the inland markets, and they did not like paying Jaja's charges. Jaja refused to stop taxing them. In 1887 the British vice-consul, Harry Johnston, invited him to talks. Jaja went. As soon as he arrived he was seized and held aboard a British ship.
He wasn't tried at home. He was taken to Accra, in the Gold Coast, and heard by a naval officer, far from Opobo and from anyone who could speak for him. That troubled even some people in London. In March 1888 a member of the House of Commons asked why the hearing had been held so far from the king's friends and witnesses. The question changed nothing for Jaja. He was exiled, first to London according to some accounts, then to St Vincent and Barbados in the West Indies.
In Barbados something remarkable happened. People there, descendants of Africans carried across the Atlantic, were angered by how a king from their ancestral homeland was being treated, and British officials blamed his presence for unrest. There is still a Barbadian folk song about King Ja Ja.
His death made the news far from the creeks. On 9 August 1891 The New York Times ran a short obituary under the headline "King Ja Ja of Opobo Dead". In Frodsham, the grave of his son Waribo, the schoolboy who died of a lung infection in April 1882 at thirteen or fourteen, is still easy to find. Two small white arrows point the way, one at the gate opposite the Ring O'Bells pub and another further down the path. There is no headstone, only words cut into the edging stone. Even his name keeps a trace of the long road he travelled. One historian, Walter Ofonagoro, wrote about his ancestry under the name Mbanaso Okwaraozurumba, the Igbo boy he was before Bonny made him Jubo Jubogha and the British made him "Ja Ja".
In 1891 Britain finally let him go home. He died on the journey and never saw Opobo again. Without him, the kingdom faded quickly. In 1903 his people put up a memorial to him in the centre of Opobo town, and it still stands, honouring a man who was once sold as property and then built a kingdom of his own.
