State: Abia

Abia State sits in Nigeria’s southeast. It was created in 1991, carved out of the old Imo State along with a handful of other new states that year.

Umuahia is the capital, but most people who know Abia think of Aba first. Aba earned the nickname “the Japan of Africa” decades ago, for workshops that turn out shoes, bags, belts, and garments without any factory backing them, just skilled hands and small machines passed down through families.

Ariaria International Market is where most of that work gets sold. It is one of the largest markets for locally made goods anywhere in West Africa, with tens of thousands of stalls packed into a few square kilometers.
The state borders Imo to the west, Anambra to the northwest, Enugu and Ebonyi to the northeast, Cross River to the east, Akwa Ibom to the southeast, and Rivers to the south.
Most residents are Igbo.

Within that, groups like the Ngwa, Ohafia, Arochukwu, and Bende each hold onto their own dialects, festivals, and local histories.
Arochukwu carries one of the heaviest histories in the state.

The Ibinukpabi shrine there, once known outside Igboland as the Long Juju, settled disputes for a wide stretch of the region and, less proudly, fed into the transatlantic slave trade before colonial authorities shut it down.

Ohafia is known for something very different: a war dance performed by men in feathered headdresses and animal-skin costumes, still staged at festivals and funerals rather than kept as a museum piece.

Umuahia holds the National War Museum, built around artillery, bunkers, and other relics from the Nigerian Civil War, including a site tied to Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. The town is also home to Government College Umuahia, a secondary school old enough to count novelist Chinua Achebe among its former students.

Michael Okpara, premier of Nigeria’s old Eastern Region and a strong push behind early agricultural policy, came from Abia. The agricultural university in Umudike carries his name. Abia State University in Uturu is the state’s other major public institution.

Football fans know Abia for Enyimba F.C., based in Aba, which won the CAF Champions League in both 2003 and 2004, becoming the first Nigerian club to retain the title.

Away from the factories and markets, Abia still runs on farmland. Palm oil, cassava, yam, and rice grow across the state, and the Azumini Blue River in Ukwa East draws visitors who come just to see how clear the water runs. Between the trading floors of Aba and the farms further out, Abia keeps a busy economy going without the oil wealth some of its neighbors rely on.