A cluster of some twenty-two village communities south of the Benue, each with its own council of elders (igabo) and its own Oche, formed from several distinct migration streams - many of them refugees from Apa, part of the old Kwararafa confederacy. There was no Idoma state before the British invented the Och'Idoma; the ground between Igala, Tiv and northern Igboland is currently blank on the map.
Not an ending: the country passed to the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in 1900, and 'the greater part of Idoma land remained largely unknown to the West until the 1920s'. The British then created the Och'Idoma as head of an Idoma Area Traditional Council - a centralised office the Idoma had never had. Over 1.3 million Idoma live in Benue State today.
The only monograph devoted to Idoma origins; it is the source that replaced the single-ancestor 'Iduh' tradition with multiple migration streams.
Armstrong's Ethnographic Survey account of the Idoma-speaking peoples and their neighbours - the standard extent source.