Up to the late nineteenth century, European knowledge of Igboland was extremely limited. Despite the continuous presence of European traders along the southeastern Nigerian coast since the seventeenth century, the difficult environment of the Niger Delta and the mangrove zone along the coast, combined with the resistance of coastal trading communities such as Bonny and Calabar to any encroachment into their commercial hinterland, had effectively blocked European access to the Igbo-speaking areas. The first direct contacts between Europeans and Igbo communities were made in the course of the expeditions on the Niger and the Cross River in the 1830s and 1840s (Schön and Crowther 1842; King 1844)—expeditions that had been informed by an interest in commercial exploration and antislavery measures and by missionary endeavors. But they did not lead to any permanent European presence on the rivers. In the same period, information about Igboland was gathered from Igbo “recaptives” in Sierra Leone. Europeans appeared regularly on the Niger by the 1850s, but even after the establishment of trading posts and the beginning of missionary work in Onitsha in 1857, the radius of intelligence gathering remained small. For decades, mission activities did not extend beyond Onitsha and a few communities situated along the Anambra River. The information collected from visitors to Onitsha was scanty and left room for much speculation about the potentialities of Igboland proper. Summarizing the knowledge of his time in his West African Countries and Peoples, James Africanus Horton (1868: 154–77) provided some information about social hierarchies (such as the role of titles) in Igbo society, and about Igbo religion, the main concern of the Onitsha missionaries. Horton was also aware of a peculiar role played by Arochukwu. But he could describe the area only in very general terms as the “Empire of the Eboes,” consisting of “numerous independent tribes” (ibid.: 154, 172), with virtually no information about the geography and political situation of the interior.

Two short journeys were undertaken by missionaries of the Church Missionary Society into the Onitsha hinterland in 1878, but the journey by A. G. Leonard into the Ngwa area in 1896 still revealed at the difficulties of overland travel faced by strangers in an area consisting of numerous politically autonomous communities, some of them at war with each other. Like everyone else, European visitors found they could not rely on a “passport” provided by an overarching authority, guaranteeing security.