The Truth about the Name Warri The origin of the name Warri does not belong to the Itsekiri, Urhobo, or Ijaw. It is a foreign name, just as Lagos, Calabar, Escravos and Forcados are Portuguese names. Warri is a corruption from the name of a Portuguese sailor who explored the creeks of the western Niger delta, just as the word Kalabari in the eastern Niger Delta is said to be a corruption from the Portuguese name of Calabar. The whole region from the mouth of rivers Forcados and Escravos to the inland waterways now called Warri River was nicknamed after the Portuguese sailor Afonso de’ Aveiro, who pioneered in the exploration of the region in the 1480s. His surname of “Aveiro” would be pronounced in its Latin form of “Aweiro,” yielding various corruptions of “iwere” and “wari.” It was the British colonial officer Captain H. L. Gallwey who rationalized the name by calling it Warri in the 1890s. It is therefore factually false for any of the three groups in the western Niger delta to lay claims to the origin of the name Warri. It is patently a foreign name. There is plenty of irony in the claim by the Itsekiri establishment that the word “Iwere” or Warri is synonymous with Itsekiri. The truth is that when Afonso de Aveiro was operating in the creeks of the western Niger Delta in the 1480s, the name Itsekiri did not exist. What we now know as Itsekiri nationality was founded or created by the children and descendants of the fugitive Benin Prince Ginuwa who did not meet the Portuguese until 1516. The terms Itsekiri and Olu were not in existence when Ginuwa was alive. It was after his death that his children took those words from Ode Itsekiri, an island that bore the name of a man who had received them after their difficult wanderings in the creeks of the western Niger Delta. Such is the truth that we learn from the premier Itsekiri historian William Moore. /// credit @ UHS.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 16:42:37 +0000