01/09/2026
ODION IS NOT URHOBO LAND. IYARA IS NOT AN URHOBO WORD. READ THE FILES.
Urhobo purveyors of historical falsehoods have repeatedly recycled two claims as though repetition can turn a lie to the truth: that they own Odion, and that ‘Iyara’ is some ancestral Urhobo Word and name on Odion land. Neither slogan survives their tribal dictionary or the judgments as it concerns the lands in question. This is not two equally weighty oral traditions. It is a paper trail. Courts already heard the founding myth, watched the witnesses, compared it with earlier Native Court orders, and refused to give the Oghorogbo line ownership of Odion.
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1 The Odion record already answered the ownership question.
In the Agbassa title proceedings before Webber J. (Ogedegbe’s evidence 19 November 1929), Odion was listed as a place and the ownership dispute was heard in court. There was no such thing as “Odion-Urhobo” in the case. The Urhobo people who were mentioned were not established as owners of Odion. The evidence described them as tenants, farmers and people living or working there by permission.
Chief Ogedegbe swore:
“I am chief of Odion. Odion is Jekri. Odion does not belong to Agbassa. We were at Odion before Agbassa. Agbassa farm at Odion with our father’s permission. We gave Sa Leone permission to make road he pays rent. Agbassa have no lands in Odion.”
The judge found the testimony and arguments to be supported by the facts. In his judgment, Webber, J. said:
“The particular features in this case are all in support of the contention that the Jekris are owners of the land, viz.:-
(a) There are no Agbassa people in Ogbejo (sic Ogbe-Ijaw), Wilkey Town, Alder’s Town, and Pessu Town.
(b) The head Chief of Odion is Jekri.
(c) The head Chief of Fugbe is Jekri.
(d) Agbassa Village is known as ‘Bomali’ which is a Jekri word.
(e) Not a single Chief of the surrounding lands supports the Agbassa claim.”
The judge continued:
“The head Chief of Effurun, a Sobo man, says that the only land Agbassa possesses is a place called ‘Bomali’ and that the Olu of the Jekris gave it to Agbassa.”
And as to services rendered and tribute paid by Agbassa to the Olu of the Jekris, the judge said:
“I have no reason to disbelieve the evidence of the defendant and his witnesses on these points.”
He concluded:
“I am satisfied on the evidence, apart from any legal plea of res judicata that when the Agbassa came to Warri they were given permission by the Olu of Jekris to settle on land which is now known as Bomali or Agbassa Village and that permission was granted to them to farm on lands adjoining their villages.”
There was no “Odion-Urhobo” in that record when the Urhobo/Agbassa side claimed ownership and lost the case.
The judge’s findings are devastating to the later name-game. The head Chief of Odion was Jekri. The surrounding chiefs did not support the Agbassa claim. Bomali was identified as the Agbassa settlement and as a Jekri word. The Olu of the Jekris was identified as the authority who gave the Agbassa permission to settle and farm.
The ownership claim failed.
Seeing that the larger claim failed, the later strategy becomes easier to understand: when the whole town cannot be claimed, claim a portion of it; when the portion cannot establish title, turn the name of an occupant into a supposed ancestral title.
That brings us to Iyara.
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2 “Iyara/yara” is a Yoruboid word for a moat, ditch or trench. It is not a Urhobo conveyance.
In Itsekiri, Iyara means moat. That is in the Itsekiri dictionary. A moat is a trench, a defensive ditch. The place popularly known as Iyara was originally spoken of as Atse-Olu. It was called Iyara because the old settlement resembles a fort ditch. The present landscape of the area can still prove that.
The same root sits in Osun Yoruba land. Itsekiri is Yoruboid. In Yoruba, iyara / yara is a trench, ditch, or defensive moat behind town walls. That is why you get Ila-Iyara in Osun: the older town name “Ila,” later tagged with “Iyara” for the fortification. There is an Iyara in the Yoruba-speaking part of Kogi and another in Ondo State. The word belongs to a Yoruboid naming system.
The question that never gets answered is the only one that matters for the name-game:
What does “Iyara” mean in Urhobo?
Produce the Urhobo dictionary entry. Produce the Urhobo etymology that generated the word. Until that is done, pasting “Iyara” name as a form of ownership because a man you claim is an Urhobo man answered to the name which has no meaning in your language is linguistic squatting: take a Yoruboid/Itsekiri word, hang it on a man who lived on a plot in Odion, then announce that the plot, the town and the name are Urhobo.
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3 The man Iyara appears in the record as a named occupier on terms not as the founder of Odion.
There is a Urhobo story that Iyara is the son of Oghorogbo and therefore a founding patriarch.
There is another account that fits how the courts later treated him: Chief Kpekpe Numa Ogedegbe, the Ogitsi of Warri, a timber merchant who dealt with men of the standing of the late Ooni Adesoji Aderemi, broke his hand, was treated by a young native orthopaedic doctor in the Igala country of present-day Kogi, brought that man to Odion as domestic staff, allowed him two marriages (Itsekiri and Urhobo), and put him on one plot opposite the Ogedegbe house. The man paid £1 a year. He did not expand beyond the plot given to him. When he died he was buried in Kogi.
Even if one assumes without conceding the Urhobo genealogy, pedigree does not invent radical title.
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4 1928: Native Appeal Court of Warri orders Iyara and his people to pay £1 a year on Odion land.
The 1953 judgment did not invent this. It recited it.
Case No. 388/28 of 12/12/28 stood between the Ogisin/Ogisi side as plaintiff and Iyara as defendant. The substance recorded in 1953 is:
The Ogisin family are the owners of Odion land.
Iyara and his people were ordered to pay £1 annually for the right to remain in possession and to farm thereon.
The terms Justice Mbanefo later quoted are the language of a restricted occupation, not a grant of the town:
• £1 a year as rent to the Ogisin family;
• farm the portions already used by the late father and his family;
• no rubber, cocoa or coffee without special permission of the Ogisin children;
• palm nuts freely;
• build on old building sites only; no new sites unless with permission;
• already-planted cocoa stays with the planter only until that person leaves.
Iyara was dead by 1953. The first plaintiff then was his daughter. The court recorded that at the time of the 1928 case he was head of the Oghorogbo family. That is why 1928 sits across the later claim.
The smear that Chief Dore decided 1928 because he was related to the Ogisin side was raised in 1953 and rejected. Judge Mbanefo’s point was practical: if that was a real ground, Iyara could have attacked the judgment when it was given. He did not. The order lived from 1928 into 1953. Stopping payment does not cancel a judgment.
A later arrears claim for £5 failed on identity of plot and succession to Iyara. Mbanefo’s comment closes the dodge: that later technical failure does not affect the validity of the 1928 judgment, which the magistrate had not questioned. A pleading defect in an arrears suit is not a declaration of title.
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5 1953: the Oghorogbo family sued for the land in dispute. Mbanefo did not give them Odion.
Suit No. W/30/1952, 30 September 1953, L. W. Mbanefo, Warri Judicial Division.
Plaintiffs: Aduweye Oghorogbo and Iluwe Oghorogbo, for the Oghorogbo family of Odion.
Defendants: Chief Ogedegbe and Erugha Ereku.
The claim was declaration of right to undisturbed possession of the land in dispute by native law and custom, injunction, and £100 for trespass. They said they and their ancestors had been there from time immemorial. They produced an irregular 32-sided plan. They talked of houses, rubber and kola, and of trees uprooted about January 1945.
The defence was Ogisin family land. The first defendant spoke of his own plantations and of the 1928 suit against a predecessor of the plaintiffs, after which £1 a year was paid until death. The second defendant said the whole of Odion, including the land in dispute, belongs to Ogisin.
The plaintiffs’ founding story put Oghorogbo in Odion with Eyekpimi, Eravo and Onoriobe “beyond human memory,” with Ogisin people later given portions. The defendants’ story was the reverse: Ogisin founder; Oghorogbo, Eyekpimi and Onoriobe placed as occupiers.
Mbanefo did not treat the two stories as equal. He said he had no difficulty accepting the defendants’ account as the true story. The plaintiffs made an unfavourable impression in the box. He tied that conclusion to the 1928 judgment.
Then he went onto the ground.
The rubber land south of the road to Agbassa was admitted on the plan as the first defendant’s. The first plaintiff said her father had rubber there and the first defendant planted among those trees. The judge inspected. It was not a new plantation. The first defendant had been tapping it for at least twelve years. The plaintiffs could not show any portion of that plantation as their own. That land had been in the first defendant’s undisputed possession for at least fifteen years. The plaintiffs were not entitled to it.
North of that sat two small pieces: houses said to belong to Iyara’s children, and land said to have been given by Oghanran (Oghorogbo’s daughter) to Pajiya. Arotola Iyara said he built a long out-house there about 1938. The judge accepted long possession of that plot by Iyara’s children, particularly Arotola, possibly since 1938, and treated those two areas as one piece.
Then the finding that ends the modern boast:
These are the only two plots in the land in dispute which the plaintiffs satisfied the court had been in possession of members of their family and which they were entitled to occupy.
He rejected the claim that they and their ancestors had from time immemorial farmed the whole of the land in dispute. He did not find they were in possession of the green-edged “scene of the cause of action” when the suit was filed. No trespass proved on the sliver he allowed. No damages. No costs. Injunction confined to that sliver, without prejudice to whatever individual members might have acquired on those plots only.
1953 is not a Urhobo victory speech. It is a court cutting a family claim down to two house plots after refusing the immemorial story.
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6 The last trick is the name itself.
This is the method when the judgment will not move: go to a place that already has a name, take the name as a personal or family label, wait, then announce that the place was named after you because you founded it. In truth the traffic ran the other way. The place was older. The settler borrowed the label. A century later the borrowed label is sold as proof of discovery.
That move only dies where the place is too famous to steal. For example places like Warri, Benin and Lagos are documented in maps, leases, courts, palaces and trade books. Some Urhobo’s named themselves and their families after these popular places. That is why a man can be called Sam Warri without becoming the founder of Warri. That is why a Mudiaga Eko can carry “Eko” without becoming the founder of Lagos. That is why an Ubini family in Ughelli can wear a Benin-derived name without becoming the owners of Benin.
If those three cities had been poorly recorded backwaters, the same habit would have been used to claim all three. The habit is the point. Adopt the name of the ground you were allowed to stand on, then tell your grandchildren the ground was named after the family.
Iyara is that habit in miniature. An Itsekiri/Yoruba word for a moat is hung on a man who occupied a plot in Odion. Odion itself is then talked about as if the occupant invented the town.
The 1928 order and the 1953 plan say otherwise. The name was already there. The occupation was limited. The later story reversed the arrow.
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7 Read the files. Produce the evidence.
If there is a new Urhobo deed, a new final judgment awarding them Odion, or a Urhobo dictionary that makes “Iyara” an Urhobo land-word older than the Itsekiri and Yoruba entries, produce it.
Until then, the files already written in Warri are enough: an established Itsekiri ownership record for Odion; a restricted occupation dressed up as a foundation myth; a borrowed place-name dressed up as a founder’s signature; and courts that refused to sign either costume.
The 1929 record did not who anything like “Odion-Urhobo.” In Odion land. It established itsekiri ownership and an Agbassa settlement at Bomali by permission.
The 1928 Iyara judgment did not establish a founder of Odion. It imposed £1 annual payment for the right to remain and farm on specified land.
The 1953 judgment did not turn the Oghorogbo family into owners of Odion. It reduced the claim to two plots which the family could prove they were entitled to occupy.
And “Iyara” is a yoruboid word and it is found in multiple Yoruba speaking lands that includes itsekiri’s. It is in Yoruba dictionaries and itsekiri dictionary but not on urhobo dictionaries.
It all proves the same thing we have been saying for centuries:
“URHOBO WAYO.”
By Lord_of_Warri
Itsekiri Activist and Historian.
on 𝕏, FB And TikTok.
