Calabar City-States

Efik tradition traces the settlement of the Calabar area to migration from Ibibio country, and places the founding of the main towns around the seventeenth century. Each town was governed by the heads of its principal houses, with disputes and debts regulated by the Ekpe society, a graded association whose sanctions were binding on members and on traders who dealt with them.

Ekpe's authority made commercial agreements enforceable across the towns and inland, and it functioned in effect as the region's law. The towns competed with each other, and rivalry between Duke Town and Creek Town runs through much of the recorded history of the period.

Calabar's trade with European vessels is documented from the seventeenth century, first in captives and later, from the mid-nineteenth century, overwhelmingly in palm oil. Efik houses acted as middlemen between European firms anchored in the river and Ibibio, Annang and Igbo producers inland, holding the two apart in the pattern common to the delta ports.

Literacy in English became established among the trading elite unusually early: Efik traders kept correspondence and diaries in English from the eighteenth century, and the surviving diary of Antera Duke is one of the few first-hand African accounts of the Atlantic trade period. Presbyterian missionaries arrived from 1846, and Calabar became a centre of mission education, printing in Efik and later of colonial administration.

Treaties with British consular authorities from the 1840s progressively limited the towns' independence, and in 1884 the area came under British protection. Calabar served as the administrative headquarters of the Niger Coast and then Southern Nigeria Protectorate until the capital was moved to Lagos, and direct British trade with the interior ended the Efik middleman position.

The Ekpe society, Efik title systems and the annual festivals continued through the colonial period, and the office of Obong of Calabar developed into the recognised paramount traditional stool for the Efik. Calabar's mission history, its early literacy and its role in colonial administration remain a distinct part of its legacy.

The Obong of Calabar is recognised as the paramount traditional ruler of the Efik, presiding over the Efik chieftaincy structure and over the ceremonies associated with Ekpe, within Cross River State. The office holds customary and cultural authority only, and successions to it have at times been disputed.