Isoko

The Isoko live in the southern part of Delta State, mainly around Oleh, Ozoro and Emevor, and speak Isoko, an Edoid language closely related to Urhobo. Although often grouped with the Urhobo by outsiders because of this linguistic closeness and shared territory in the western Niger Delta, the Isoko are a distinct people with their own clans, ruling titles and traditions. Farming of yam and cassava, fishing in the creeks of the Niger Delta, and, since the mid-twentieth century, oil production have shaped the Isoko economy.

Oral traditions among Isoko clans vary, with some tracing ancestral founders to migrations from the Benin kingdom area and others describing separate origins within the Niger Delta; some historians argue that Isoko-speaking communities represent an early Edoid population that developed largely independently of Benin's later political expansion. The traditional Isoko clans, including Owhe, Uzere, Iyede and others, developed as separate polities that were later brought together administratively rather than through a shared precolonial monarchy.

Isoko communities were traditionally organised by clan, each headed by an Ovie or equivalent titled ruler and supported by councils of elders and age-grade associations responsible for communal labour and social order. There has historically been no single paramount ruler over all Isoko clans; twentieth-century colonial and postcolonial administration introduced broader organisational structures for the Isoko as a group, including bodies representing Isoko interests collectively.

Isoko traditional religion recognises Oghene as a supreme being, together with ancestral spirits and deities associated with rivers and land, honoured through shrines and periodic festivals. These beliefs continue to be practised by some Isoko alongside a Christian majority.

The Iri-Ame (new yam) festival and other harvest celebrations mark the farming calendar in Isoko communities, and masquerade traditions linked to ancestral veneration remain part of funeral and festival practice in some areas.