Ijaw people are people in Niger Delta in Nigeria, inhabiting regions of the states of Ondo, Bayelsa, Delta, Edo, Akwa Ibom, and Rivers state.
The Ijaws were one of the first of Nigeria's people to have contact with the Westerners and were active as go-betweens in the slave trade between visiting Europeans and the people of the interior when West Africa was still known as the White Man's Graveyard.
The Ijaw people live by fishing and farming crops such as rice, plantains, Cassava, yams, cocoyams, bananas, and other vegetables as well as tropical fruits such as guava, mangoes, and pineapples; and trading Smoke-dried fish, timber, palm oil, and palm kernels which are processed for export. While some clans had powerful kings and stratified society, other clans are believed not to have had any centralized confederacies until the arrival of the British. However, owing to the influence of the neighboring Kingdom of Benin, individual communities even in the western Niger Delta also had chiefs and governments at the village level.