King Jaja of Opobo

Jubo Jubogha — anglicized as Jaja — was born in Amaigbo, in Igbo country (in what is now Abia State, Nigeria), in 1821. He was sold into slavery at the age of approximately twelve and was trafficked to Bonny — the principal palm-oil trading port of the Niger Delta — where he was purchased by Chief Allison of the Anna Pepple House.

He worked through the Bonny commercial structure across the next thirty years, eventually inheriting the leadership of the Anna Pepple House. He demonstrated unusual commercial acumen — he learned to read and write English, mastered the volatile palm-oil pricing structure of the period, and built personal trading relationships with the British, French, and Liverpool palm-oil houses.

In 1869 — after a Bonny civil war between his Anna Pepple House and the rival Manilla Pepple House — Jaja left Bonny with his followers and founded the new city of Opobo on the Opobo River. Within five years Opobo had displaced Bonny as the principal palm-oil exporting port of the Niger Delta. By 1880 Opobo was handling approximately eight thousand tons of palm oil annually — twice the volume of any other Delta port — and Jaja personally controlled the Delta's commercial trade with European houses.

He refused throughout the 1880s to accept British colonial commercial intermediation. He shipped palm oil directly to Liverpool houses on his own vessels, denied British merchants the access to his upriver suppliers that they considered their commercial right, and conducted independent diplomatic correspondence with Queen Victoria.

In 1887 the British acting consul Harry Johnston invited Jaja aboard the British warship HMS Goshawk for "consultations." Jaja was abducted under flag of truce, deported to Accra for show trial, and exiled to the British West Indies. He was permitted to return to West Africa in 1891 but died on the voyage home — most likely poisoned at Tenerife — on the seventh of July 1891, age approximately seventy.

He is honored here as the formerly enslaved man who built the Niger Delta's most powerful nineteenth-century commercial kingdom.