Jubo Jubogha — Jaja — rose from Igbo slave-boy in the Anna Pepple House of Bonny to found the breakaway state of Opobo in 1869, capturing the palm-oil trade of the Imo River and shipping directly to Liverpool through his own agents, bypassing the British supercargoes. By 1885 Opobo handled 8,000 tons of palm-oil a year, more than any other Delta port.
The Berlin Conference (1884–85) placed the Oil Rivers under British 'protection' and the Foreign Office appointed Harry Hamilton Johnston as Acting Consul in 1887 with explicit instructions to enforce free trade. Jaja refused to sign the standard protectorate treaty without an explicit guarantee of his hinterland trade monopoly; Johnston gave the guarantee in writing, then invited Jaja to a conference aboard HMS Goshawk on 19 September 1887. Jaja came under safe-conduct, was arrested on deck, taken to Accra for a summary trial under Admiral Sir Walter Hunt-Grubbe, convicted of 'blocking trade', and deported first to Accra and then to St Vincent in the West Indies.
The deportation was condemned in the House of Commons by Sir Charles Dilke as 'a breach of national faith'. Jaja was permitted to return in 1891; he died at Tenerife on the voyage home, aged about 70. His remains were brought back to Opobo and buried in the cathedral that bears his name. The Jaja precedent — sovereign invited under safe-conduct, arrested, deported, dies in exile — was applied verbatim to Nana of Ebrohimi (1894), Oba Ovonramwen of Benin (1897), and the Sultan of Sokoto Attahiru I (1903).