The Aro expedition and the end of the Long Juju

The decision to invade the Aro was taken in 1900–01. The Aro Field Force under Colonel Montanaro set out on 1 December 1901 and finished in March 1902, according to Ekechi: 1,550 soldiers, 75 officers and four columns (Akwete, Oguta, Elele, Owerri). Missionaries joined as chaplains. The British justified it as a campaign against slave trading and human sacrifice and against the oracle known as the “Long Juju”, Ibini Ukpabi, at Arochukwu.

Igbo resistance was organized. Ekechi lists a talking-drum alarm, trenches with spikes, war medicine (ogwu agha), oracles consulted before battle (Ibini Ukpabi, Igwekala, Ogbunorie, Amadioha, Agbala) and Dane guns. A British officer at Owerri conceded that resistance had been fierce. Afigbo writes that Montanaro’s destruction of the Ibini Ukpabi shocked the region and that many believed lesser oracles would now fail.

Kalu questions the picture of an “Aro empire”. According to him the expedition was militarily disappointing (villagers fled and two villages were burnt) and the Aro were a small, weakly joined people of three groups (Igbo, Akpa, Ibom). He cites the Aro motto glossed as Ako bụ ije, “cunning is the art of survival”. Echeruo’s dictionary records Cukwu (Chukwu) as the Aro name for Ibini Ukpabi, the oracle at Arochukwu.