Lost history · c. 10th century to 1911 · Fact and tradition
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Its king carried no sword. His messengers walked with staffs of peace and sun-ray marks on their faces, and any slave who reached his soil was free. How Nri held a quarter of Igboland together for centuries.
Most old kingdoms we read about were built by armies. Nri, in the heart of Igboland in today's Anambra State, was different. Its ruler, the eze Nri, held power that was religious and mystical, not military. People obeyed him not because soldiers would come if they did not, but because they believed he stood between them and the earth itself.
Nri's story begins with Eri. Tradition calls him a sky being, sent down by Chukwu, the great God, and credits him with first bringing order to the people of the Anambra valley. Nri and its neighbour Aguleri both trace their lines back to him. Eri is also remembered as the one who first counted the days and named them eke, oye, afor and nkwo, after four ruling spirits, so that people would have set days to meet, trade goods and share knowledge.
Then comes a harder story, about Eri's son, also called Nri. He cried out to Chukwu because his people were hungry. Chukwu told him to cut off the heads of his first son and his first daughter and plant them in the ground. Before he did so, he was told to cut marks called ichi into their foreheads. From the son's head grew yam, the great Igbo staple. From the daughter's head grew cocoyam, the crop women looked after. The story says this made a blood bond between the Igbo and Ana, the earth deity, and that Chukwu taught Nri how to tend crops. Nri also gained the knowledge of a yam medicine, and other Igbo communities would travel to Nri for it, paying tribute each year in return.
When all this happened, nobody can say for sure. One scholar, Angulu Onwuejeogwu, thought Nri's influence might go back to the 12th century, and royal burials have been dug up that date to at least the 9th. Oral tradition puts Eri's arrival in 1043, another writer puts the first eze Nri, Ifikuanim, around 1225, and others place Eri as late as the 1500s. In 1911 the names of 19 eze Nri were written down, but the list is hard to turn into dates, because long gaps fell between one king and the next.
Those gaps were on purpose. When an eze Nri died, at least seven years had to pass before the next was chosen. People believed the dead king would show his choice of successor through signs, and the waiting years were spent reading them.
Once chosen, the new king made a journey to Aguleri on the Anambra River. There he paid respect at the shrines, visited the tomb of Menri, collected the ofo and sat on the throne of Eri at Enugwu Aguleri. On the seventh day he returned to Nri, where he went through a pretend burial and was dug up again, then was rubbed with white clay as a sign of purity. When an eze Nri died for real, he was buried sitting up in a chamber lined with wood.
The king himself lived mostly apart from his people. His work was done by officials called ndi Nri, ritual experts you could spot at once by the ichi on their faces. In the Nri style, one line ran from the middle of the forehead down to the chin, and another crossed the face from cheek to cheek, repeated until the pattern looked like the rays of the sun. These men walked across Igboland carrying staffs of peace, cleansing the land of crimes, settling quarrels and blessing the harvest. They also had the power to install the next king.
Ordinary men in towns under Nri's influence could share in this authority by taking ranked titles called ozo and nze. Such men were known as mburichi. They controlled farming matters and judged who was guilty in disputes. Another symbol carried great weight: a young palm frond called omu. Anyone carrying it, or any object marked with it, was under protection.
Nri treated violence as an abomination that polluted the earth. So instead of going to war, the eze Nri punished wrongdoing by cutting people off. A town that broke certain taboos could be shut out from Nri's ritual world, isolated by a kind of spiritual siege.
Nri was also, in its own way, a place of mercy. It did not keep or trade slaves, and after the tenth eze Nri was chosen, any slave who set foot on Nri soil became free. People rejected by their own towns could find shelter there. Even Igbo families far away would send children thought to be abnormal, for example a child whose upper teeth came in before the lower ones, to Nri for cleansing, rather than having them killed as sometimes happened elsewhere.
Each year the king held Igu Aro, the counting of the year. Towns under his influence sent people to bring tribute. In return he gave them yam medicine and a blessing for fertility. It was a day of peace. Before it, nobody planted crops, split wood or made needless noise.
Nri grew by spreading this way of life, not by conquest. Towns swore allegiance by oath. By the late 16th century its influence had crossed the Niger to Igbo towns on the west bank, and at its height it reached about a quarter of Igboland. Fine bronzes found at Igbo-Ukwu, about 18 kilometres south of Nri, are linked to it by the descendants of Eri.
Then things changed. From the tenth to the fourteenth reigns, there was conflict, probably tied to the money that the slave trade offered. Nri's influence faded after the start of the 18th century, as Benin and Igala grew stronger. It lingered on, weaker and smaller, until 1911. That year British colonial troops forced the reigning eze Nri to give up the ritual power on which everything rested. Nri still exists as a traditional state today, and since 1974 there has been an effort to revive its culture.
