An Ijaw man, Koko was a convert to Christianity
who later returned to the local traditional religion.
Before becoming king, he had served as a Christian
school teacher, and in 1889 this helped him in his
rise to power.
The leading chiefs of Nembe, including Spiff,
Samuel Sambo, and Cameroon, were all Christians,
and after having ordered the destruction of Juju
houses a large part of their reason for choosing
Koko as king in succession to King Ockiya was that
he was a fellow Christian.
With the settlement of European traders on the
coast, Nembe had engaged in trade with them, but
it was poorer than its neighbours Bonny and
Calabar.
By the 1890s, there was intense resentment of
Royal Niger Company's treatment of the people of
the Niger delta and of its aggressive actions to
exclude its competitors and to monopolize trade,
denying the men of Nembe the access to markets
which they had long enjoyed.
As king, Koko aimed to resist these pressures and
tried to strengthen his hand by forming alliances
with the states of Bonny and Okpoma.
In January 1895, he threw caution to the winds and
led more than a thousand men in a dawn raid on
the Royal Niger Company's headquarters at Akassa.
Arriving on 29 January with between forty and fifty
canoes, equipped with heavy guns, Koko captured
the base with the loss of some forty lives, including
twenty-four Company employees, destroyed
warehouses and machinery, and took about sixty
white men hostage, as well as carrying away a
large quantity of booty, including money, trade
goods, ammunition and a quick-firing gun.
Koko then sought to negotiate with the Company for
the release of the hostages, his price being a return
to free trading conditions, and on 2 February he
wrote to Sir Claude MacDonald, the British consul-
general, that he had no quarrel with the Queen but
only with the Niger Company.
Despite this, the British refused Koko's demands,
and more than forty of the men were then
ceremoniously eaten.
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