"Dress. — The dress of the men is exceedingly practical, the young men wear simply a loin cloth, and when they wish to dance this is elaborated by cowry armlets, ivory anklets and other merely decorative adjuncts ; they remove their loin cloth without the slightest hesitation at a washing place, whether women are present or not. Women about the age of seventeen or eighteen, that is to say, after they have definitely gone to their husbands, invariably wear a cloth, but remove it with an equal lack of embarrassment at a washing place. Boys put on their loin cloths sometimes as young as ten, sometimes as old as fourteen ; after fourteen they will only remove it under the circumstances already mentioned ; girls, on the other hand, up to the age of seventeen, are as often seen without their cloths as with them.Character. — In general character the people seem to be exceedingly pleasant, and in particular far less greedy for money than the peoples on the west of the Niger ; it happened to me, on one occasion, for example, that 'some repairs were wanted to a folding table ; a man to whose house I had been and with whom I had eaten kola, undertook to do the work ; it was performed to my entire satisfaction, and I enquired what the price would be : to my intense surprise the reply was, " you are my friend, you have eaten kola with me, I can't take money from you."This was by no means an isolated episode ; when the doctors of Ifite Nibo came to me I was anxious to secure a specimen of snake medicine from them ; we were by that time on very good terms, and when I told them what I wanted, and asked what the price would be, they consulted together for a few minutes and said to me, " we will ask nothing, you are our friend, you are a traveller and we are travellers, you talk to us about our business as if you knew about it, you are a doctor ; we will not take money from you."Communal work. — With the seat of authority so indefinite as it was in most cases, it is natural that the organization of work was less elaborate than among the Edo. At Nqfia the young men would go out to clean the road when the chief told them, and the old men would look after them to see that they did their work ; precisely how long this took they did not say, but at Ugwoba one day in the whole year was devoted to road work, and it is not surprising that they now say that they have less time for yam farming."Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria by Thomas Northcote 1913

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