The Port Harcourt Question: the meaning of land in a city in south-eastern Nigeria

Thesis

This thesis, based on a year of ethnographic research in Nigeria, revolves around a land conflict between two ethnic groups who contest ownership of Port Harcourt, a city in the southeast of the nation. The two ethnic groups are the Ikwerre and the Okrika. The Ikwerre and the Okrika are very different peoples with their own histories and livelihoods: the former being sedentary yam farmers, the latter seminomadic fisherfolk and, in earlier times, slave traders. I contrast their understandings of land. I go on to examine the way the city and their conflict over its land have brought these different understandings together.

The Port Harcourt Question—who owns Port Harcourt?—is the name inhabitants of the city give to the long-standing land dispute between the Ikwerre and the Okrika. The purpose of this thesis is principally to explore this question. It is not, however, an attempt to answer the question. Rather I seek to understand the genesis of the question and why it continues to be asked. To do this I ask and answer three other questions which are formed by inserting two additional question marks into the Port Harcourt Question thus: (i) Who? (ii) Owns? (iii) Port Harcourt?

In addressing the first of these questions (Who?), I describe the Ikwerre and the Okrika and how they gain and transmit land rights. Understanding how land rights are gained and transmitted is necessary to make sense of how land disputes in the city play out.

In addressing the second question (Owns?), the verb of the Port Harcourt Question, I speak to scholarship, anthropological and otherwise, on ownership and property. I examine what ‘owning’ land means in this context and why it is so contentious. I also explore what land means and how this entity differs from other things which are said to be ‘owned’. Particular attention is given to the law— litigation being the chief way the land disputes between the Ikwerre and the Okrika play out.

The third question (Port Harcourt?) challenges the received understanding of Port Harcourt as a non-traditional city of strangers created ex nihilo by Europeans. I argue that the city owes its contemporary form to its pre-urban history, a history which, given the notion that the city emerged from virgin swampland, is assumed not to exist.

Ultimately, I argue that it is history which perpetuates the Port Harcourt Question. Historical knowledge gives substance to the claims made by the Ikwerre and the Okrika to own the land of the city. I contend that, in this context, the historical knowledge which underlies claims to ownership is potential.

Authors: Rolt, FAC

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-44ozqxyw5
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English