Abstract

The Assistant District Officers, Sir S.P.L. Beaumont on his Intelligence Report, he presented in 1940 about the Odual (Isaka) Clan in Degema Division in Owerri Province had asserted that people of Kugbo were lazy and care free. This paper re-evaluates this assertion with redressing the erroneous claims by investigating into the occupations and industry of the Kugbo people from Pre-colonial Periods and 1940and secondary sources. This study reveals that contrary to the Eurocentric assertion, the people of Kugbo were quite industrious as they engaged in numerous subsistence economic activities from the Pre-colonial times before the advent of European ‘intruders’, These economic and agricultural activities includefarming fishing, trading, craftsmanship, palm-oil production, and blacksmithing, among others. The significance of this research lies in the vivid exposition of the agricultural and economic enterprises of the Niger Delta peoples as a rebuttal to erroneous Eurocentric documentation.

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