Legend · 1912–1913
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Nigeria's oil capital was built to ship coal, sat without a name for a year, and was finally named after a politician in London. Who owned the land before that is still an argument.
Port Harcourt is the oil city. Everybody knows that. The refineries, the Shell and Chevron offices, the soot on the washing in the morning. So it's a bit of a surprise that the city wasn't built for oil at all. It was built for coal.
In 1909 a geologist named Albert Ernest Kitson found coal at Enugu. The colonial government wanted to get it out, onto ships and away, and Enugu is a long way inland. They needed a port on the coast, linked to the coal fields by rail. Frederick Lugard, who was then governor of both the Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates, founded that port in 1912. It sat on the Bonny River, about 243 kilometres south of the Enugu collieries, and a new railway, the Eastern Line, ran between them.
The land didn't come from nowhere. The colonial government made the people of Diobu give up their land, and in 1912 building started on a port town. As it grew it swallowed other villages too: Oroworukwo, Oromeruezimgbu, Nkpogu and Rumuomasi among them. Many of those names are still areas of the city. If you've ever been told to meet someone "at Rumuomasi" or "in Diobu", you have been standing on that old ground.
For its first year, the place had no official name. It was just the new port. Then in August 1913, Lugard named it Port Harcourt, after Lewis Harcourt, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies in London and later became the first Viscount Harcourt. As far as the record goes, he was simply the man in charge of the colonies at the right moment. A whole city carries his name, though nothing in the record ties him to the place itself.
This is the part people in Rivers State still argue about, sometimes loudly. The name Port Harcourt was given from outside. But what did the people who were there first call the place, and who were they?
You can actually watch the argument happen in the sources. The current Wikipedia page says the native Ikwerre name for the area is Rebisi, and that the fishing camps and fishing grounds in the creeks south of the original port belonged to the Rebisi, an Ikwerre group. It describes the city as made up mainly of coastal Ikwerre.
But an older version of the same text, which a website called SilvaCreate copied before it changed, tells it differently. That version says the southern fishing camps belonged to the Okrika-Ijaw. It also gives two local names for the city: an Okrika name, Hakoti Kiri, and an Ikwerre name, Igwuocha.
So between one edit and another, ownership of the creeks moved from one people to another. That isn't just a tidy-up of spelling. In a city sitting on so much wealth, who owned the land first is about rights, compensation and pride. The honest answer is that the sources don't settle it, and anyone who tells you it's settled is picking a side.
What everyone does agree on is that people were living and fishing there before 1912, and that the name now on the maps came from a British office.
The port quickly had other uses. In the First World War, Port Harcourt was used as a base for military operations against the Germans in Kamerun, next door. Then, after oil was found at Oloibiri in 1956, the first shipment of Nigerian crude went out through Port Harcourt in 1958. The coal port became the oil port, and the city changed with it: overpasses, city blocks, bigger and taller buildings. It also became the main commercial and industrial city of the old Eastern Region.
The Civil War brought it into the fighting. After Biafra broke away in 1967, Port Harcourt fell to Nigerian forces on 19 May 1968.
And it kept growing, faster than anyone planned. In 1914 the town covered 15.54 square kilometres. By the 1980s it had spread, uncontrolled, to about 360. In 1950 about 59,752 people lived there. Today the urban population is estimated at around 3.8 million. The city is so crowded that in 2009 the state passed a law to push development out into neighbouring areas.
The people of the city gave it their own names in the end, whatever the maps say. In Pidgin it's Po-ta-kot, or Pi-ta-kwa. Musicians sing about it: Duncan Mighty calls himself Port Harcourt's First Son, and Burna Boy, who was born and raised there, named a song "Ph City Vibration". In 2014 it was World Book Capital, the first city in Black Africa to get that title.
A colonial secretary got his name on the gate. The people who live inside have long since made the place theirs. And the old question, whose creek it was before the surveyors came, hasn't gone away.
