On March 19, 1990, global attention was focused on the rural community of Umuagbai, then of Khana/Oyigbo Local Government Area of Rivers State when the Princess of Wales, Lady Diana, accompanied by her husband, Prince Charles (now King Charles III) formally inaugurated the Women Weaving and Training Centre.
For many, the event was to mark a turning point in the evolvement of the over a century old unique art of women of Umuagbai and other neighbouring Ndoki communities in the weaving of the Akuruaku cloth, which had become well known all over the world.
The centre built by the then Rivers State government and equipped by Khana/Oyigbo local government was fitted in a way that it provided for virtually all that he women needed to improve their art, train more women in it and market their products.
Set in the community, the women carried on with the craft while also attending to their other family demands, chores and livelihood patterns in a rural setting. Among facilities at the weaving centre were six weaving halls with 20 looms, several weaving accessories, conference centre, showroom, offices and waiting areas. The premises were also designed to host outdoor programmes that could crop up from time to time.
The March 19th, 1990 event was the first time that the community was playing host to such high calibre visitors. Apart from the royal visitors from England, the then Nigeria’s First Lady, Mrs. Maryam Babangida, under whose pet project, Better Life for Rural Women, Umuagbai women and their art were recognized, sent representatives. But the core hostess of the event was Mrs. Jane Adeleye, the wife of the then military governor of Rivers State.
The weaving and training centre was built to serve as a centre of excellence for the weaving of the traditional type of textile weaving unique among Ndoki women of Eastern Nigeria. Akuruaku cloth is so-called because it evolved from weaving the textile from of raffia palm, which is found in abundance in the area, particularly in the creeks of Imo River that runs along the entire stretch of the community.
Though locally known as Akuruaku, the cloth is also widely known as Akwete because early reports about it were recorded at Akwete, another Ndoki community across the Imo River in Abia State.
The development of the centre was coordinated with several government agencies joining hands to put it together. They included the Directorate of Foods, Roads and Rural Infrastructure, which set up a mono-pump for the centre, the Directorate of Social Mobilisation (MAMSER), which took care of orientation and mobilization of support for the centre. It was also a training centre where the veterans sat with younger women and educated them on how to weave the cloth.
The centre also benefitted from a consortium of funders, which included the defunct Peoples Bank of Nigeria, the Rivers State Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Rivers State Commission for Women, Nigerian Community Development Trust Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Family Economic Advancement Programme. At a point, 65 women who were members of Umuagbai Ndoki Women Cooperative Society Limited benefited from a loan of N130,000 from the Peoples Bank of Nigeria.
After the commissioning, the centre was handed over to Umuagbai Ndoki Women Cooperative Society Limited to run. Mrs. Ethel Ekeke, who was the Project Coordinator of the centre for so many years after the inauguration of the centre recalls the glory days of the centre.
She said the Better Life Programme and Rivers State Ministry of Commerce and Industry sponsored the society to so many trade fairs in Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kaduna and Lagos. “Our products were taken to Cameroon, Israel, Dakar, and Beijing during seminars and workshops,” she said, adding that the Nigerian Export Promotions Council (NEPC) in collaboration with the Women Programme of Shell Petroleum Development Company Limited took Akuruaku to the United States.
On 17th October, 1992, the society won the prize for the best industrial cooperative society in Rivers State. In 2000, it received an International Prize for Women’s Creativity in Rural Life at the World Summit Foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland.
In later years, the UNDP provided sewing machines for the centre, while The Adolescent Project, TAP, of Mrs. Mary Odili, trained so many women and youths as well as people with disabilities.
Speaking further Mrs. Ekeke said, “Our members have benefited from seminars and workshops on cooperative management in different parts of the country and outside Nigeria.”
But many years down the road, instead of gaining more grounds and promoting the craft of the women of Umuagabi, the Weaving Centre degenerated in its use to the point where it was totally abandoned and left to rot.
When National Point visited the place recently, the entire premises was overgrown. Some parts of the roof had caved in. The interior had gathered a lot of dust. Most of the facilities installed in the pace were no longer there, and the place was just waiting to collapse.
National Point sought to find out why this international centre of excellence was abandoned and left to rot away when it was still needed both by the women of Umuagbai and the international market.
The road from Port Harcourt to Umuagbai began to degenerate right after Afam, the headquarters of Oyigbo Local Government, where work stopped on the reconstruction of the road. The rains made the journey worse. Many stretches of the road were flooded and in some places, vehicles coming from the opposite directions had to wait for the other to cross flooded portions because the road could not take two vehicles at a time.
However with the approach to Umuagbai, the rest of the trip was smooth, especially from the junction where a road branched off to Akwete. A signpost that announces Umuagbai as the Land of Integrity, Unity and Love welcomes the visitor; and just a few minutes further from the junction on the right, the Weaving Centre comes into view. A few steps up to the pavement of the centre, the visitor is confronted by the name of the late Princess of Wales etched into the wall: “Akuraku Weaving and Training Centre, A Better Life For Rural Woman Project Commissioned by Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales Today the 19th March of the Year of The Lord 1990.
A little background of the Ndoki Clan of which Umuagbai is part would suffice here. Ndoki country lies on both sides of the middle stretch of Imo River that runs from Mbaise in the present Imo State through the Opobo Estuary and empties into the Atlantic Ocean.
For several centuries Ndoki communities played significant roles in the Trans-Atlantic trade, which first began with the slave trade, and, then the export of oil palm after slave trade was abolished. The communities still bear landmarks of these international trades.
With the decline of the exportation of oil palm in Nigeria, following the discovery of crude oil in commercial quantity in the second half of the last century, the prominence of Ndoki settlements also began to wane.
The creation of states in 1967 put the communities at the southernmost tip of the East Central State and did not seem to get much of government attention in terms of development projects and government presence. The boundary adjustments of 1976 balkanised the communities into Imo (now Abia) and Rivers States and made the political and development marginalisation of the communities in both states even worse.
Despite the discovery of large deposits of crude oil in the communities, they remained largely underdeveloped. The situation forced many of the people, especially the young, educated and skilled to seek jobs and opportunities in faraway places like Aba, Port Harcourt and even Lagos.
Those that were left behind went back to subsistence farming. A few leased out oil palm plantations that had become wild and raffia palms that are also abundant to people from neighbouring Ogoniland and Ibibioland to harvest the oil palm fruits and tap the trees for wine.
The women however began to develop a special skill for weaving a unique kind of textile that became known all over the world as Akwete Cloth; so named after one of the Ndoki communities on the eastern flank of Imo River. But locally in Ndoki communities, the textile is known as Akuruaku.
Akuruaku as its name indicates, is cloth made from raffia, was initially derived from weaving cloths from raffia yarns that are in abundance in the land. The art itself, according to Mrs. Faith Uchenna, was intrioduced to Ndoki women by women married from neighbouring Anang and Ibibio communities in Akwa Ibom State, who were adept at making bags and masquerade costumes from raffia materials. While the Ibibio and Anang stopped at using raffia to make bags and masquerade costumes from raffia, Ndoki women elevated it to fanciful textile, which could be sown into special and fanciful materials.
Akuruaku material is a product of the ingenuity of these women. These craft has evolved from the use of raffia yarn to dyed cotton and silk for producing traditional wrappers, dresses, suits, shirts, chieftaincy regalia and household furnishing.
In making the cloth, the women go through a tedious process that takes days to complete. The cloth that comes with exotic designs is woven into wrappers that are well priced for special ceremonies like marriages, burials, age-grade outings and other festivals.
The women quietly weaved the Akuraku cloths alongside their farming preoccupation until sometime in 1987 when the women formed themselves into a cooperative society with the name, Umuagbai Ndoki Women Cooperative.
Fortune was to smile on the women and their cooperative society in 1989 when they were identified by the wife of the Military Governor of Rivers State, Mrs. Jane Adeleye. Mrs. Adeleye took the story of Akuruaku to Mrs. Maryam Babangida, the wife of the then military President and her pet project, Better Life for Programme for Rural Women.
Mrs. Faith Uchenna, a former President of Umuagbai Ndoki Women Weaving Cooperative Society, told National Point, that though the centre thrived for many years before it begun to go into disuse, so many factors led to its decline.
She said the centre also gave a boost to the cooperative society as many women from Umuagbai and even neighbouring communities took advantage of it. Even the men, she said were excited about the centre because it boosted the reputable of the community. “The community got us the land through an elder and they want us to take care of the place,” she said.
One of the factors, she said was the lack of interest that younger women had in taking up the art. She also said materials used for weaving the cloth had become expensive, and given the worsening state of the economy, many of the older generation could not afford the cost of staying on the weaving course. And to add to these, she said government support and funding facilities from financial institutions dropped.
The centre reached its height under Mrs. Ekeke, when she was the Project Coordinator. According to a story of the centre, Ekeke was “instrumental in diversifying the cloth into many useful household products resulting in increasing demands and thus providing employment for girls and women including the handicapped.”
But all that is gone.
National Point was told that after a while facilities were let out for public use, including church services. But that also stopped.
Mrs. Uchenna said that a lot of the women engaged at the centre are now too old to continue, while the younger women were leaving to the city and not willing to continue with weaving.
“The cost of weaving is now very high for us. We need money and we also need the market. Light (power supply) is also an issue at the centre,” she said. Efforts by the women to get the support of Oyigbo Local Government to support them, she said have not paid off because of the instability at the local government. “They keep changing the chairmen from time to time public power supply was also a factor in the decline of the centre,” she added.
Have they tried attracting foreign investment to help them digitalise the production process? Mrs. Uchenna said, they were cautious about the Chinese because they will copy art and reduce the quality because they want to commercialise it.
The current President of Umuagbai Women Weaving Cooperative Society, Mrs. Grace Akara Janet, told National Point that for now, it is like a self-help project that the women are doing. “As a cooperative society, it requires pooling of resources. But the economy choked us and the market is not coming as such. Besides, the stress in weaving manually has put off a lot of people” she said.
In the past, she said the women worked with the NEPC to attend international fairs. But that is no more.
The Director of Cooperatives of Rivers State Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Mrs. Elizabeth Chidi-Wike, told National Point that there was very little that the department could do to help the Umuagbai women if they themselves failed to organize themselves.
“It’s a cooperative. Government’s work is that of a regulator. They own the cooperative and it is left for them to organize themselves and put their house in order. We cannot intervene because there has not been any complaint from the members or appeal for government to intervene,” Mrs. Chidi-Wike said.
She however stated that the ministry’s officials visited the centre last year “and we were touched by the state of the centre. But more worrisome is the fact that the cooperative society was no longer functional.”
The director of cooperatives said members of the cooperative were now operating from their individual homes. “That is not what a cooperative should be. They should come together, pull their resources together and when they need support, government can offer it,” she said.
The South-South Zonal Coordinator of NEPC, Mr. Joe Ita, told National Point that he was not aware of the plight of the Umuagbai women’s cooperative society. He said, the council would be interested in helping the women if they come forward.
