Igala People - Origin

Origin

The traditional Igala society is largely agrarian, although fishing is also a mainstay of the people especially the Igalas of the riverine Idah area.

Boston (1968) believes that the central geographical location of the Igala people has exposed them to a wide variety of linguistic as well as cultural influences from other ethnic groups in the country. Notable among these are the Igbira, the Bini, the Igbo, the Hausa, the Idoma and the Yoruba ethnic groups. However, the most significant relationship, by far, is that between the Igala and the Yoruba peoples.

Igala and Yoruba have important historical and cultural relationships. The languages of the two ethnic groups bear such a close resemblance that researchers such as Forde (1951) and Westermann and Bryan (1952) regarded Igala as a dialect of Yoruba.

Akinkugbe (1976,1978) is of the opinion that based on evidence, Igala is neither a dialect of Yoruba nor a language resulting from the fusion of Yoruba and Idoma as claimed by Silverstein, but rather Igala shares a “common ancestor” with Yoruba. In her words, “... this common ancestor was neither Yoruba nor Igala but what we have labeled here as Proto-Yoruba-Itsekiri–Igala (PYIG). The evidence suggest further that presumably, Igala separated form the group before the split of Yoruba into the present day Yoruba dialects considering the extent of linguistic divergence found between Igala on one hand, and the rest of Yoruba on the other” (1978: 32) Akinkugbe cites lexicostatistic evidence as well as evidence of sound shifts and lexical innovations as support or corroboration of this claim.

Other comparative works aimed at investigating the language status of Igala (directly and indirectly) are Omamor (1967) and Williamson (1973). In fact, Williamson is the originator of the label ‘Yoruboid’ for the group of languages comprising Yoruba, Itsekiri and Igala for the purpose of distinguishing “between Yoruba as a language on the one hand, and Yoruba, Itsekiri and Igala as a genetic group on the other”. (Akinkugbe 1976:1) Akinkugbe refers to the proto- language of the group as Proto-Yoruboid in 1976 and Proto-Yoruba-Itsekiri-Igala (PYIG) in 1978

Contemporary historians believe that the Igala most likely shared a proto-Kwa ancestry with the modern Igbo and Yoruba people as well as most ethnic groups of Nigeria today. Thus, the ethnic family would include not only the prior two, but groups like the Idoma, and the Nupe to the north.