Frederick William Koko Mingi VIII of Nembe

King Frederick William Koko, Mingi VIII of Nembe (1853–1898), known as King Koko and King William Koko, was an African ruler of the Nembe Kingdom (also known as Nembe-Brass) in the Niger Delta, now part of southern Nigeria.

A Christian when chosen as king of Nembe in 1889, Koko's attack on a Royal Niger Company trading post in January 1895 led to reprisals by the British in which his capital was sacked. Following a report on the Nembe uprising by Sir John Kirk which was published in March 1896, Koko was offered a settlement of his grievances but found the terms unacceptable, so was deposed by the British. He died in exile in 1898.

An Ijaw, Koko was a convert to Christianity who later returned to the local traditional religion. Before becoming king (amanyanabo), he had served as a Christian schoolteacher, and in 1889 this helped him in his rise to power. The leading chiefs of Nembe, including Spiff, Samuel Sambo, and Cameroon, were all Christians, and after having ordered the destruction of Juju houses a large part of their reason for choosing Koko as king in succession to King Ockiya was that he was a fellow-Christian. However, there was at the same time a coparcenary king, the elderly Ebifa, who ruled at Bassambiri and was Commander-in-Chief until his death in 1894.

With the settlement of European traders on the coast, Nembe had engaged in trade with them, but it was poorer than its neighbours Bonny and Calabar. Since 1884, Nembe had found itself included in the area declared by the British as the Oil Rivers Protectorate, within which they claimed control of military defence and external affairs. Nembe was the centre of an important trade in palm oil, and it had refused to sign a treaty proposed by the British, opposing the Royal Niger Company's aim of bringing all trade along the kingdom's rivers into its own hands.

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