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Jabo variant spellings Dyabo, Djabo) is the self-designation of an ethnic group located in the southeastern part of the Republic of Liberia in West Africa. First described by Sapir under the name Gweabo , it was later transcribed by Herzog as JA2BOW2-3 Proverb 30109 (pronounced in the IPA as [ɟʱābō]). They have also sometimes referred to themselves as the Gweabo or Nimiah tribe.

In conclusion to his history, laid out his personal social hierarchy as the following:

• Family

• House group KA2

• Town GWLO2

• Gens/Clan *TEYN2AN3NOWN2

• Tribe DA3KO2

• Confederacy DA3KO2

• Nation BLEYH2

Liberian administrative units:

• Town

• Township

• Clan (Obsolescent)

• District (ADM2)

• County (ADM1)

(According to the Social Security Death Index, Blooah was born on 15 Sep 1896 and died in Denver, Colorado, 80207 USA in February 1978.)

English speakers also use the name of the group for a single member of that group, or for their speech variety.

Tribe

Like many of their neighbors in the area, the Jabo have very pronounced attitudes of pride and loyalty towards their groups, and are frequently referred to both by themselves and by others as a tribe, a term that in Liberia has a meaning imprecise at best. Confusion may arise due to the circumstance that in Liberia the English word "tribe" is also sometimes applied to the second-order administrative "districts," which are not necessarily congruent with "tribes" defined in local ethnotaxonomic terms. "Tribe" is also occasionally used for a third-order administrative "clan" when the latter comprises multiple ethnic clans, as well as for a variety of other more or less ad hoc groups.

The Jabo describe themselves as a "confederation of tribes", or even "a nation".

Location

The area inhabited by the Jabo is now mostly in the Lower Kru Coast district of the new (1984) Grand Kru County, with a few outliers across the river in Maryland County.

Their territory coincides more or less with the southern half of Lower Kru Coast District in Grand Kru County. This southern portion of the district was defined in terms of Liberian administrative units as the Garawe/Nemia "clan" (code 180810), but it appears that this terminology is no longer used, the name Yedweke appearing on current maps, Jabo territory extends along the coast of southeastern Liberia from Garraway in the northwest proceeding in a southeasterly direction to the Deeah (Gee or Ji) River, and from there inland almost as far as Bewehn. The northern half of the district is inhabited by the Trembo (Trenbo, Eng. "Tremble") ethnic group and which has its center at the district capital in Bewehn.

Maps showing location of the Jabo in Southeastern Liberia

• 
  Cape Palmas map (1869) showing Nimiah as "New Garraway"
• 
  Map of Grand Kru County in Liberia 4°55′N 8°15′W
• 
  Map of Lower Kru Coast District
• 
  Liberian administrative clans showing Nimiah/Yedweke "clan" (or township) in the extreme southeast of Lower Kru District, bordered in white.

Population centers

Names of towns

At the level below the administrative clan, the Jabo are organized into administrative townships (each with a "town chief"), usually consisting of multiple clusters of villages or hamlets. Hasselbring & Johnson list seven Jabo town complexes:

• Garaway Beach (Polou)
• Genoyah
• Nemiah (aka Nimiah) includes: Glopluken, Jlatiken, Mensiengloh, Nyanoken, Penoken, Yaytueken)
• Nyambo
• Piaty
• Poloya (includes: Poloylowen, Pungbaloken, Tuwaken, Weteken)
• Weteken

Since the recent civil wars in Liberia, many towns have been emptied, renamed, reclaimed, or swollen by displaced populations.

• Garraway is now called Garraway Beach.
• Half Garraway is now called Yedweke.
• (Upper) Nimiah is now called Wilsonville.

Nimiah

The Jabo population center most reported in the literature is the town complex of Half Garraway (variants: Half Garroway, Half Gadowe, Half Grawe, New Garraway), known in Jabo as Nimiah, which is situated halfway between Garraway in Grand Kru County and the Seaside Glebo town of Fishtown (Waa) in Maryland County. They are not to be confused with the numerous Garawe sound-alike settlements in eastern Maryland, nor with the Fish Town that is the county seat of River Gee County.

Nimiah, having many spelling variants, is not to be confused with the classical Greek site of Archaia Nemea or its adjacent modern town of Nemea (town).

Nimiah consists of two main centers: one village cluster on the coastal lagoon, and another, larger cluster located approximately 10 km inland. The town on the lagoon (Lower Nimiah, Nimiah Beach) consists of several centers, of which the principal one is now called Yedweke, at latitude 4°28'48" N (4.48), longitude 7°52'39" W (−7.8775), altitude 83 m (275 ft); population 1724.

Upper Nimiah (Nemiah, Nemia, Nimia) is located at Latitude 4°32'40" N (4.5444), Longitude 7°53'37 W (−7.8936), altitude 101 m (334 feet); population 3688. It is now called Wilsonville.

Language

Main article: Jabo language

The Jabo are known for their drum-signalling system, which mirrors to some degree the suprasegmental system of their highly tonal language. The collection of their proverbs and sayings assembled by Herzog and Blooah is often cited in the folkloristic literature. The Jabo language is complex and has been studied by well-known scientific linguists.

What's in a name?

The term Jabo in a narrow sense means "Ja people", the -bo being an animate plural suffix (compare with ba in ba-ntu). A single member of the group is a Jawe "Ja + person" and the language *Jame "Ja + tongue"(Glebo form [jaoĩ] . The significative element Ja is explained as being the proper name of the eponymous ancestor of the group.

Compare:

[ɡ͡bɔ̏wẹ̀] "Glebo man of Fishtown (Waa) clan"

[ɡ͡bɔ̏bọ̀] "Glebo people of Fishtown (Waa) clan"

Gweabo

The Jabo are also referred to in the literature as the Gweabo. The term is not interchangeable or a mere variant of the word Jabo, as might be assumed.

Gweabo was originally incorrectly generalized to apply to the larger group (the Jabo confederation) because Sapir's Jabo informant was a member of that sub-tribe.

"The Grebo occupy only a small area in the extreme southeastern corner of Liberia. They are strung out along the coast from the Cavally River to a place called Fishtown, a distance of some 60 miles. All members of the tribe with whom we conversed called themselves Grebo. Sapir calls them the Gweabo."

The Jabo form of the name is [ɡwȅȁbọ̀]. This name is also used for them by at least some Glebo speakers as [wèǎo].

The term is not a mere variant of the word Jabo, as might be assumed.

It is, rather, defined as the name of "a group of five tribes" or "a language".

It properly designates a certain patrilineal descent group (in this case a "sub-tribe"), within the larger group ("Jabo tribe"). It may be conjectured to have as an eponym the common personal name (g)wea.

Among the subdivisions of the Gweabo sub-tribe mentioned in Jabo Proverbs from Liberia are:

• [bʱọ̏lọ̀kwẽ̀ẽ]
• [ɡbɔ̏lɔ̀ ɡwlọbo]
• [ɲạbọ́]

Nimiah

Blooah sometimes also claimed to be a member of the "Nimiah tribe;" sometimes Nimiah was called a township. As mentioned above, it corresponds to a Liberian administrative clan. The pronunciation in Jabo which was recorded was [nĩ́w̤i̯ẹ̃].

Classification

Dealing with a people with little recorded history and for which little detailed ethnographic information is available, an expedient framework for placing them with respect to related peoples is the classification of their language.

In Joseph Greenberg's highly influential The Languages of Africa (1966), he proposed a classification of the extensive group of languages which stretched from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope, which he termed the Niger-Congo languages. At the bend of the West African coastline where Henry the Navigator's merchant explorers in 1482 took a hard left at Cape Palmas for the Bight of Benin, the Europeans began their acquaintance with an energetic culture and variegated speech varieties that came to be know as the Kru languages. Greenberg found a place or them in his Niger-Congo scheme by attaching their classification as an offshoot of a group that was then know as Kwa languages, which itself was placed in the West Atlantic languages before adhering it to the Niger-Congo backbone.

Today, positioning the Kru group as part of the Kwa group, no longer seems justifiable, and the West Atlantic group itself has morphed into the Atlantic–Congo languages. Volta-Congo seems to have taken the place of Kwa

Greenberg	Ethnologue	Glottolog
Congo-Kordofanian	Niger-Congo	Niger-Congo
– West Atlantic	– Atlantic-Congo	– Atlantic-Congo
–– Kwa	–– Volta-Congo	–– Volta-Congo
––– Kru	––– Kru	––– Kru
*	–––– Western	–––– Western Kru
*	––––– Grebo	––––– Grebo
*	–––––– Liberian	–––––– Liberian Grebo
*	––––––– Grebo, Barclayville [gry]	––––––– Barclayville-Gboloo-Central Liberian Grebo
*	––––––– Grebo, Central [grv]
*	––––––– Grebo, Gboloo [gec]
*	––––––– Grebo, Northern [gbo]	–––––––– Northern Grebo
*	––––––– Grebo, Southern [grj]	–––––––– Southern Grebo
*	*	––––––––– Glebo
*	*	––––––––– Jabo
*	*	––––––––– Nyabo
*	*	––––––––– Wrelpo

Both Ethnologue and Glottolog agree down to the level of Liberian Grebo. Ethnologue then splits Barclayville-Gboloo-Central Liberian Grebo into three units and Northern into nine units. It subsumes Jabo under Southern Grebo. Glottolog splits Southern Grebo into four co-ordinate speech varieties, of which one is independently Jabo.

One sees then that Jabo has found its own branch among Glottolog's 38 different Kru languages and the 1433-strong Atlantic-Congo language family. Thus it provides the traditional satisfaction of the Stammbaum, dendritic, or "family tree" genealogical classification, fitting Noam Chomsky's epistemological criterion of observational adequacy. It also satisfies a single one of the next-higher criteria for descriptive adequacy (say, that of mutual intelligibility), but fails the subsequent criterion, in that the rules it provides are either inaccurate or missing, e.g. it fails to factor in the criteria of diglossia and prestige . 

Unfortunately, the Stammbaum is only a two-dimensional model and provides cannot aspire to the highest level, that of explanatory adequacy for the multidimensional complexity of the ethnological situation in Southeastern Liberia, lacking a principled decision theory and an exhaustive ethnographic deep structure. This will be dealt with below.

Although many would classify them as such, experts have been reluctant to classify the Kru macrolanguage as being a typical Segmentary lineage system.

Social Structure and Conflict Jacob Moscona, Nathan Nunn, James A. Robinson§ 21 February 2017

https://www.brown.edu/academics/economics/sites/brown.edu.academics.economics/files/uploads/Social%20Structure%20and%20Conflict%20January%2020%202017.pdf

1. Polygyny (4 wives) would make for lots of half-brothers.

2. Land claims based on contracts.

3. High belligerence, but usually not based on honor, but on land.

4.Numerous loyalty vectors besides genealogy, e.g., secret societies.

Jabo and Grebo

At this point it may be appropriate to turn to the certain amount of confusion is created by the fact that many sources treat "Jabo" as being either identical with, or as a subgroup of Grebo. (For a discussion of this see the article Jabo (language).)

Whereas the economic and quasi-ethnological designation "Kru" had begun to become known to European traders from the outset of the triangular Atlantic slave trade anchored in West Africa, seeded when the Pope gave the Portuguese the rights in 1454-55 to acquire slaves along the African coast by force or trade, the designation "Grebo" only became well known after the colonization begun by the Maryland Colonists.

William Wadé Harris (c. 1860 – 1929), a renowned Christian preacher from Grawae, Liberia although he considered himself a Grebo, hired himself out as a Kru-boy in Cape Palmas -- meaning he joined a seaman's corporation, not that he had joined a Kru dako (tribe). Later there was also Grebo Corporation.

These corporate workers came from all across the territory of what is now referred to as the Bassa-Kru-Grebo-Krahn-Krumen continuum. Following the political instinct to promote the influence of each of the numerous dakwe claimed in the group, members negotiated a union with a headquarters in Freetown, even creating a Waterside Pidgin Kru to facilitate inter-African intercommunication and a unified face to present to their (would-be) employers.

These corporations came to be regarded by Europeans as tribes in their own right, by virtue of their coherence. Thus, rather than there having been discovered a most-prestigious "Kru" speech variety (say, Klao), that became recognized as an Ausbausprache called "Kru proper", the stewpot that was their corporation was turned upside down and gelled into a commercial entity, the components of which were never quite clear. Klao might go on to attempt to attain status as an Abstandsprache, by virtue of its claim on the folk etymology on "crew".

• Influence of Liberian Executive & Centralization
• Influence of Americo-Liberians/Congos
• Influence of Missionaries
• Influence of Commercial Enterprises (Iron ore, rubber, etc.)

• Invisible Nation (Poro, Masons)
• Exogamy
• Polygyny

Geographical factors

Although the Jabo area is adjacent to the Seaside Grebo area to the east-southeast, the two are separated by the Deeah (Die or Decoris, also called Gee or Ji "Leopard") River, which is often treacherous and difficult to cross, especially during the rainy season or when a strong tide is running in the estuary. Because of the lack of usable roads connecting them, the Jabo tend to go northwest to market, into a Kru-oriented area at the county seat of (Barclayville) and Garraway, north to Bewehn, or sometimes northeast to Plibo, rarely to the commercial and government center in Harper. This tends to emphasize mutual affinity and intercommunication with the Klao (Krao or "Kru Proper"), rather than with the Seaside Grebo. In 2005 the roads to Barclayville were completely closed.

They are also located in the same newly created (1984) county as the Klao (Grand Kru County), unlike the Glebo in Maryland County, from which they are once again politically separated.

A Bundle of Ethnolinguistic Threads

Exogamy

A cultural trait present among the Jabo, and apparently widespread across the Kru group is the practice of virilocal exogamy. This is enforced as a taboo at the clan level, but in practice, many may also marry within their sib.

Sapir's Jabo informant averred:

“My tribe in Liberia was known as the Djabo Confederacies. At first are [our] family or tribe opens with the history of one family. The father of the family was known as the Dja. For that reason intermarriage is not allowed in our tribe, but we much [must] go to another tribe for a mate....

The three sons made up the Gentile and no on[e] could intermarry in either [another] group. Relation ships, right, officers, and duties are hereditary and the most sacred po[s]sessions of African tribes. Any violation of them is punishable by the gods.”

Polygyny

It is a custom among the group described as the Kru metalanguage, that polygyny is, if not the default configuration, widely accepted. Censuses show that up to one-third of domestic relationships are structured around this model, with the accepted upper limit of four wives. Don't look at US-Liberians country wives.

Thus a man may have four gentes of his wives competing in the kitchen. Some may be at war.

Bride-wealth committed to on the installment plan, if not paid off, can cause all kinds of problems. Loan.

Christian v. Animism

Splits marriages, villages.

Secret Societies

Poro, Masons etc

Not-So-Secret

Soldiery

Transportation

The extent of this practice is also limited by the difficult transportation situation. With an annual rainfall of 3,000 mm in the southeast of Liberia and few paved roadways outside of major towns, no motorable long- or medium-distance roads in Grand Kru lead directly north to Barclayville, the county seat of Grand Kru County, nor east to Harper, the county seat of Maryland County.

In 2005 the road to Barclayville, the County Seat of Grand Kru County was completely set off from the rest of the county because of weather and the civil wars. The separation of Grand Kru County from Maryland County has magnified many of the difficulties, since there is no bridge over the Ji River. It is a Liberian national goal to repair this widespread national situation.

Diglossia

Another of the forces regulating the practice is a linguistic one. In an ordinary marriage one has a cooperative arrangement. In making the virilocal transfer, it may take weeks, months, even years before the partners can communicate effectively. The borderline case is when the couple may only be able to communicate in Liberian English, which according to the SIL survey of 2002 is as much as 10%.

Nonetheless, the exogamy factor has a certain effect of heightening intergroup awareness and communication. It remains to be seen how this will be affected by the refugee situation and urbanization.

Commercial corporations inverted into Ausbausprachen

"Kru proper" becomes an inversion of the stewpot Klao --Abstandsprache

All of these threads weave a fabric.

Bibliography

• [WPA] Blooah, Charles (1938). "American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 – 1940". Library of Congress. Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers' Project. BCG. Retrieved 12 May 2020.

• [GJH] Greenberg, Joseph H. (1966). The Languages of Africa. Indiana Univ. Press. GJH.

• [HG] Herzog, George (1945). "Drum Signaling in a West African Tribe". Word. 1. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute.: 217–238. doi:10.1080/00437956.1945.11659257.

• [H&B] Herzog, George; Blooah, Charles G. (1936). Jabo Proverbs from Liberia: Maxims in the Life of a Native Tribe. London: For the International Institute of African Languages & Cultures by Oxford University Press, H. Milford.

• [I&D] Ingemann, Frances; Duitsman, John (1976). "A Survey of Grebo Dialects in Liberia". Liberian Studies Journal. 7 (2). Cited in [H&J], Section 2.2.

• [H&J] Hasselbring, Sue; Johnson, Eric (2002). "A Sociolinguistic Survey of the Grebo language area of Liberia" (PDF). SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-074. Retrieved 11 May 2020.

• [H&L] Holsoe, Svend E.; Lauer, Joseph J. (1976). "Who Are the Kran/Guere and the Gio/Yacouba? Ethnic Identifications along the Liberia-Ivory Coast Border". African Studies Review. 19 (1). Cambridge University Press: 139–149 (11 pages). doi:10.2307/523856. JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/523856. {{cite journal}}: Check |jstor= value (help)

• [HD] Hymes, Dell (December 1964). "Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communications". American Anthropologist. 66 (2): 1–34.

• [MFD] McEvoy, Frederick D. (1977). "Understanding Ethnic Realities among the Grebo and Kru Peoples of West Africa". Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. 47 (1). Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute: 62-80 (19 pages). doi:10.2307/1159195. JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/1159195. {{cite journal}}: Check |jstor= value (help); External link in |jstor= (help)

• [PJ] Payne, John (1860). A Dictionary of the Grebo Language. New York: No. 26 Frankfort Street: Printed by Edward O. Jenkins. Retrieved 10 May 2020.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)

• [SG&HG] Schwab, George (1947) [1930]. Harley, George W. (ed.). Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland. Vol. XXXI. Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.: Peabody Museum. p. 26. Retrieved 18 May 2020.

• [NGGL] Sapir, Edward; Blooah, Charles G. (1931). "Notes on the Gweabo Language of Liberia". Language. 7. Linguistic Society of America: 39–41. doi:10.2307/409665.

• [TNS] Trubetskoy, Nikolai (1939). Grundzüge der Phonologie [Principles of Phonology] (in German). Translated by Baltaxe, Christanne A. M. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press (published 1969).

External links

• Maryland in Liberia, U.S. Navy map from 1853 in the Library of Congress.

Category:Ethnography Category:Ethnic groups in Liberia Category:Cannibalism in Africa Category:Districts of Liberia