The technicians of historical methodology have usually emphasized that the relationship between historians and their facts is, or should be, dialectic. This supposed counsel of perfection, however, glosses over an important point whose neglect is usually, or indeed invariably, a source of serious distortion or error—that is, the fact that such a dialogue can only begin after the historian has already immersed himself in the available sources, and thus has in some way been taken captive by those sources. Indeed, if the historian can manipulate his facts, it appears that his sources can also manipulate him.

Thus the kind of history the historian writes depends all the time on the kind of sources available to him. The more the sources are narrow in focus and unidirectional in orientation, the narrower the range of the historian's work and the more such work is oriented in the direction from which the sources derive. The wider the range of the sources, and the more these are multidirectional, the more the competent and scientific historian is in a position to produce a work that does more justice to the many-faceted experiences of man in society—that is, the more the historian is in a position to take a meaningful aim at the Rankean goal of all historical effort.

This tendency for the historian to be taken captive by the provenance and the main interest of his sources has been, and continues to be, operative among the historians of Nigeria's peoples and polities.

African historiography has over the past decade begun to pay increasing attention to photographs as a source for African history. A growing body of work has raised a number of methodological and theoretical questions about how scholars can and should work with images. From their experience with written documents, historians are aware of the ideologically charged conditions under which colonial knowledge was produced. This awareness has armed scholars with a skepticism to look beyond the image itself and examine the physical and technological environment in which photographers worked. Posed studio shots that create “natural” settings and post-event retouching are only some of the practices photographers used to endow their images with a greater semblance of accuracy.

Andrew Roberts and David Killingray's “outline” of photography in Africa charts the development of photographic techniques and how their use created specific kinds of images of Africa; Virginia-Lee Webb emphasizes photographers' manipulation of not only their subjects, but also the environment in which they were photographed. What this work has produced is an oft-spoken axiom that photographic images of Africa (or any other place) ought not be taken at face value. This axiom has guided a significant amount of scholarship, although Beatrix Heintze wisely cautions against overinterpretation.

Scholars who work with written documentary evidence from the colonial period have well established the ways in which administrators, missionaries, and other Europeans represented Africans as an “other,” as they sought to create cultural and social distance between themselves and Africans. Still other scholars have combined written and oral materials to show how Africans established their own identities and interpreted colonial discourses to create alternative, liberating discursive spaces.

Recent contributions to this journal have taken various approaches to travelers's accounts as sources of African history. Elizabeth de Veer and Ann O'Hear use the travel accounts of Gerhard Rohlfs to reconstruct nineteenth-century political and economic history of West African groups who have escaped scholarly attention. But essentially they use Rohlfs' work as he intended it to be used. Gary W. Clendennen examines David Livingstone's work to find the history under the propaganda. He argues that, overlooking its obvious problems, the work reveals a wealth of information on nineteenth-century cultures in the Zambezi and Tchiri valleys. Unfortunately, Clendennen does not use this source for these reasons. He uses it instead to shed light on the relationship between Livingstone and his brother.

John Hanson registers a basic distrust of European mediated oral histories recorded and written in the African past. He draws attention to the fact that what were thought to be “generally agreed upon accounts” may actually reflect partisan interests. Hanson dramatically demonstrates how chunks of history, often the history of the losers, are lost, as the history of the winners is made to appear universal. Richard Mohun can be seen to represent the winners in turn-of-the-century Central Africa. His account is certainly about himself. I attempt, though, to use his account to recover some of the history of the losers, the Africans, which Mohun may have inadvertently recorded.

My question is double; its two parts—one historical, one methodological—are inextricably interdependent. The first concerns the experience of the people from Zanzibar who accompanied, carried, and worked for Richard Dorsey Mohun on a three-year (1898-1901) expedition into Central Africa to lay telegraph wire. The second wonders how and how well the first question can be answered using, primarily, the only sources available to me right now: those written by Mohun himself.

This checklist of published versions of the Sunjata epic aims to include the widest possible corpus of written variants of the Mande tradition available through publishers, libraries, and in unpublished higher degree dissertations. It builds upon the work of Guy Tombs, Stephen Belcher, John Johnson, David Conrad and Ralph Austen. Entries are arranged alphabetically, by the name of thejeli (griot or bard, plural jeliw) or writer. Included in each entry are (1) the bibliographical reference (and subsequent references if the item has been republished or published in a translation or excerpted form); (2) the name of the performer (or writer); (3) details of the location and date of the performance; (4) details of the recorders) and translators); (5) the format of the published version (including the language(s) and the type of translation); and (6) the coverage of the published version. Coverage is indicated by use of a simple five-fold division of material traditionally included within the epic:

1. 1. Paternal ancestry of Sunjata—links with the Middle East, Bilali, the Three Simbons, etc.

2. 2. Buffalo-woman tale

3. 3. Birth and childhood of Sunjata

4. 4. Exile of Sunjata

5. 5. Return and war with Sumanguru

When Caliph Attahiru of Sokoto chose flight over submission to the British in March 1903, it was left to the blind and aging Waziri, Muhammad al-Bukhari, to provide those who remained behind with an explanation of how they could remain good Muslims while accepting infidel rule. Citing a text of the caliphate's founder, Shehu ʿUthman Dan Fodio, he argued that one could befriend the British with the tongue, without befriending them with the heart. It remained for others to develop the vocabulary that their tongues would need for this task.

A particularly intriguing item in the vocabulary that emerged during the turbulent first decade of colonial rule was a new usage of zaman(time, era) that occurs in the records of the Emir of Kano's judicial council in such terms as hukm al-zaman (rule of the era) and ʿumur al-zaman (things of the era). It is worth noting that the judicial council did not keep written records before being instructed to do so by British Resident C.L. Temple in 1909, so the records might be seen as preserving what was essentially oral discourse—expressions of the tongue. These terms occur uniquely in relation to legal matters in which the British had intervened. Understanding them can shed new light on the religious and political adaptation of northern Nigerian Muslim leaders to life under British rule. To explore their meaning requires a threefold process of examining various usages and understandings of zaman in non-legal sources; describing how the judicial council used the word; and then analyzing how this usage may have been related to any of a number of influences, ranging from British officials to West African Islamic scholars to Western-educated North Africans passing through the region.

In his brief essay on the crisis in modern Nigerian historiography, A.O. Adeoye effectively highlighted the origin and nature of the crisis. However, his work was more of a review of the different perspectives, as well as the existing literature on the issue. But the crisis of relevance that Nigerian historical scholarship is currently facing is so acute that it may not be an exaggeration to say that the discipline of history is being threatened with extinction. This has created a great amount of apprehension and self-doubt among Nigerian historians. Nevertheless, the crisis is manifested in all aspects of historical scholarship in Nigeria.

One major area in which the crisis is manifested is at the apex level of the professional association of Nigerian historians, that is, the Historical Society of Nigeria (H.S.N.), which was formed in 1955. Apart from being the first professional body of academics to be formed in Nigeria, the society was so highly regarded that even up to the early 1980s, its activities were enthusiastically embraced by most Nigerian historians. By the mid 1980s, however, interest in the association had so much waned that majority of Nigerian historians, including very senior academics stopped paying their annual dues and participating in the Congresses. The situation has reached the depressing point where institutions now find it difficult to find enough finance to host the annual Congresses.

The attempts to revive the interest of historians by choosing themes that are relevant to the contemporary Nigerian situation have not being successful.Similarly, the prestigious Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (JHSN) which was established in 1956, was last published in 1985 (even though there are a number of manuscripts awaiting publication) while Tarikh, which was supposed to popularize history at the tertiary and secondary school levels and among non-historians, has not fared better. In addition, the publication of the Ibadan History Series has long since been discontinued.

The chronology of the history of the Benin kingdom is seen by many historians as clarified in the main back to the thirteenth century and even earlier. Apart from the reports of European travelers and missionaries and some information given by merchants, this chronology is based mainly on the Benin kinglist for the periods before 1897. This list names 38 kings (obas) of Benin and covers past centuries with seemingly great accuracy (see table 1).

In spite of the many names of former obas and the pretended accuracy of the list's time-frame, it would be problematic to take it as historically factual since it cannot be corroborated by any documentation before the mid-nineteenth century. The data concerning the period before this time are almost exclusively based on the writings of the Benin amateur historian Jacob Egharevba. In his work Egharevba reported on important events in the oral traditions of Benin and connected the reign of former kings with specific years. In doing so he forced his African oral material into a linear European time scheme and into the framework specified by European written sources.

Unfortunately, very few historians have as yet critically analyzed the chronological data for Benin. This is surprising, since the great Benin researcher Bradbury noted some time ago that Egharevba's “chronological conclusions have been accepted too uncritically, especially for the period up to the first European contact” (Bradbury 1959:285f) and have been seen as historical facts without any further consideration ever since. Neither the question of so-called “genealogical parasitism,” nor any of the other fundamental problems which arise when studying kinglists have been addressed.

In 1986 the University of Ife (later renamed Obafemi Awolowo University) unveiled a wood statue of Oduduwa, the mythical founder of the Yoruba nation. Present at the occasion was Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the most famous Yoruba politician of the twentieth century. Either for political gain, or to celebrate or praise him, an Ife intellectual told Chief Awolowo that the statue looked exactly like him and that, in trying to represent the image of Oduduwa, the carver, the highly distinguished Chief Lamidi Fakeye, had simply used Awolowo as a model.

Chief Awolowo was very happy with this comparison, and gladly affirmed it. The story spread like wildfire. As the statue came to be interpreted, Awolowo and Oduduwa had the same physical build, elegance, and cap which they wore in the same style! Here indeed was the modern Oduduwa. To those in search of heroes, the Yoruba now had two “national” ones—Oduduwa, the progenitor and Awolowo, the modernizer—and a host of other aspiring and local ones. If Oduduwa founded the nation, Awolowo would unite it, after a period of internal division.

Both in Yoruba popular and intellectual discourse, the hero commands prominent attention. The Yoruba appear to be seeking the equivalent of a Mahdi, the reformer in Islam, a cultural, folk, and political hero. The ambition of many Yoruba elite, especially the politician, is to become a hero of the nation. Many have tried in vain—men such as Chief Adisa Akinloye, a longtime veteran politician, and the Chairman of the National Party of Nigeria during the Second Republic, and, until recently, Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the business magnate and politician who was denied the presidency of the country by the military regime in collaboration with powerful civilians.

Bulama (otherwise Bolama) Island is the furthest inshore member of the Bissagos Islands, off the West African coast, in the present-day state of Guiné-Bissau. On the east side of the wide estuary of Rio Jeba, it stands near the mouth of Rio Balola. Small, low-lying, partly surrounded by sandbanks and swamps, often uninhabited, and considered by whites scenically attractive but very unhealthy, Bulama has appeared in historical records with disproportionate frequency. It may have been noted during the earliest stages of Portuguese “Discovery;” two centuries on, it was investigated by the French. It was later the locality of a disastrous British settlement, the proposed home for a colony of African-Americans, and for sixty years the site of a colonial capital; and it was the subject of a well-meant arbitration by a President of the U.S.A. Finally, it was the center for an international conference on its own past, held in 1990. That past, of little importance in itself, nevertheless provides a keyhole glimpse of much of the history of the western Guinea coast over four centuries.

Our knowledge of the earlier history of the island of Bulama is slight and depends on European sources. The region of the estuary of Rio Jeba—or “Rio Grande” as it was originally known—was first visited by Europeans in the 1450s. The earliest Portuguese ship to arrive was probably the one on which a certain Diogo Gomes traveled, the date probably 1456. The account of this voyage, as edited by a contemporary scholar in the 1490s from the oral narrative of Diogo Gomes in old age, indicates that the Portuguese landed at a point along Rio Jeba and saw wild animals: deer, elephants, and crocodiles.

For the past several years, we have been editing a series of intelligence reports on the Sokoto Caliphate and Borno, all of them prepared by French officials in Tunisia during the 1890s, using information gathered from Muslim pilgrims who were passing through the Regency on their way to or from Mecca. Now that our edition is complete and we have regained a measure of control over our lives, we have been persuaded to jot down some of our reflections on this experience for the benefit of those who might be embarking on collaborative ventures of a similar sort.

Scholarly collaboration, at least in History, usually begins in one of two, overlapping, ways. Individual researchers often develop an interest in a particular topic and then seek out one or more collaborators to work on it. The reasons for doing so can be as varied as the individuals concerned—to fill some gap in their own expertise, to lighten the research load, or to ease the loneliness which the more gregarious among us feel when working in scholarly isolation.

Alternatively, two or more scholars may decide to work together and then seek out a research topic which best suits their collective interests. The reasons for adopting this second approach can be as varied as those for the first—friendship (and those involved are almost invariably friends before they become collaborators), a sense of intellectual affinity, or more crassly the attraction of being able to claim credit individually for all the work done collectively, since co-authored works still tend to “count” as much as those bearing only one name on the cover.

Ethnicity was evidently critical for the operation of the Atlantic slave trade, on both the African and the European sides of the trade. For Africans, given the general convention against enslaving fellow citizens, ethnic identities served to define a category of “others” who were legitimately enslavable. For African Muslims this function was performed by religion, though here too, it is noteworthy that the classic discussion of this issue, by the Timbuktu scholar Ahmad Baba in 1615, approaches it mainly in terms of ethnicity, through classification of West African peoples as Muslim or pagan. Europeans, for their part, regularly distinguished different ethnicities among the slaves they purchased, and American markets developed preferences for slaves of particular ethnic origins. This raises interesting (but as yet little researched) questions about the ways in which African and European definitions of African ethnicity may have interacted. Both Africans and Europeans, for example, commonly employed, as a means of distinguishing among African ethnicities, the facial and bodily scarifications (“tribal marks”) characteristic of different communities—a topic on which there is detailed information in European sources back at least into the seventeenth century, which might well form the basis for a historical study of ethnic identities.

In this context as in others, of course, ethnicity should be seen, not as a constant, but as fluid and subject to constant redefinition. The lately fashionable debate on “the invention of tribes” in Africa concentrated on the impact of European colonialism in the twentieth century, rather than on that of the Atlantic slave trade earlier—no doubt because it was addressed primarily to Southern, Central and Eastern rather than Western Africa.

It has been said that “Old movies seen again after many years seem different not because they have altered but because we have.” For the same reason, a rereading of older historical texts will convey different meanings, and reveal deficiencies and perhaps even profundities that were not initially apparent. In this paper, these observations are applied to a piece of research that was special to me at the time. I now see more clearly the extent to which my methods and mindset were a product of time, of place, and of my own training and preferences. So I will retrace my footsteps—insofar as is possible after all these years—and consider how the preconceptions and expectations of the moment affected the outcome. In other words, to reflect on the nature of thinking and writing.

My research was not concerned with African but Pacific Islands history. From the mid 1970s through to the early 1980s I engaged in dissertation work in the nineteenth-century history of Tuvalu, formerly the Ellice Islands. Older maps will identify Tuvalu as the southern portion of a British dependency, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (astride the equator and just east of the International Date Line). The nine Tuvalu islands are tiny even by the standards of coral atolls; by far the largest is Vaitupu at about six square kilometers, and the group remains economically unimportant and strategically insignificant. During the nineteenth century Tuvalu was incorporated into the world economy through the whaling industry and the copra trade, and further exposed to Western influences by missionization. The paucity of exploitable resources, however, coupled with an inhospitable environment and smallness of scale, rendered the islands unsuitable for large-scale European settlement and muted the potential disruptions of outside contacts. But there were aberrant events, such as the Vaitupu Company, which placed individual island communities under strain from time to time.

The N'ko alphabet made its first appearance in Bingerville, Côte d'Ivoire, on 14 April 1949? The invention of Souleymane Kanté of Kankan, Republic of Guinea, this alphabet constituted an attempt to provide a truly indigenous written form for Mande languages. Since its invention, a grassroots movement promoting literacy in the N'ko alphabet has spread across West Africa from the Gambia to Nigeria. A significant number of the speakers of Mande languages in Francophone as well as Anglophone West Africa have learned the N'ko alphabet, even though their governments use French or English as official languages and Muslim Mande-speaking religious leaders use Arabic in prayers and for study and teaching. The number of those who are literate in N'ko has increased without government intervention or support during the colonial and independence periods and without official support from the Islamic religious community. N'ko spread at the grassroots level because it met practical needs and enabled speakers of Mande languages to take pride in their cultural heritage. Informants from Kankan and its vicinity, one small part of the large region of N'ko's spread, said that their motivation to learn the alphabet was due to pride in their culture.

Here I examine the emergence of the N'ko alphabet as an indigenously created writing system currently used by speakers of Mande languages in the Republic of Guinea and in other countries across West Africa; the reasons behind the alphabet's creation and the process by which the alphabet evolved; seeks briefly to identify the process by which the alphabet was disseminated under the guidance of its creator in a grassroots movement fueled by individual initiative, I offer some indications as to the depth and breath of N'ko literacy within the Mande-speaking community. Finally, it discusses the motivation for learning the N'ko alphabet and the problems it poses for one local community.

Driven by the linguistic and material imperatives of the civilizing mission, early twentieth-century British missionaries sought to reduce Gikuyu, a language spoken in much of central Kenya, to a systematic code of words and phrases. Two of them—A.R. Barlow, a sometime renegade Presbyterian layman, and A.W. MacGregor, a conservative Anglican—produced Gikuyu grammars in what MacGregor described as a “tentative” effort to ameliorate the linguistic difficulties of European settlers and Christian evangelists.

This essay is an attempt to read these two dictionaries as historical texts, highlighting the ways in which they embodied the complexities and contingencies built into colonial hegemony. In the first instance, I argue that the dictionaries were functional tools of colonizing power. As John and Jean Comaroff have shown, missionaries' linguistic interventions were an integral part of the classifying project of colonial control: by insisting on rational modes of debate, and by defining the language in which the debate took shape, missionaries coercively imposed a hegemonizing trajectory onto cultural exchange. Following the Comaroffs, I outline the ways in which these grammars worked to colonize the language of Gikuyu subjects by creating and imposing linguistic meaning through the dictionary.

At the same time, I suggest that these dictionaries were more than functional tools of missionary enterprise. The dictionaries sit uncomfortably at the point of contact between missionary linguistic power and Gikuyu discourse: if the dictionary was to be useful for missionary purposes, then its authors were necessarily compelled to enter into the idiomatic lexicon of local conversations over power, property, and wealth.

In mid-1964 the Smith regime in Southern Rhodesia was moving towards a final ban on the African nationalist parties, ZAPU and ZANU. At the same time it was widely believed to be preparing for a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and the nationalist parties in their turn were trying to find ways to prevent this. Both chose to launch sabotage campaigns, so as to demonstrate African opposition. In late June 1964 there was a wave of sabotage in Chipinga and Melsetter in Rhodesia's eastern districts. Roadblocks were erected, the police camp was attacked, dynamite was laid at bridges. Notes were left at the scene of some of these actions purporting to come from “the Crocodile Gang.” On the early evening of 4 July 1964, a 45-year-old foreman at the Silver Streams Wattle Factory in Melsetter, Pieter Johannes Andries Oberholzer, was driving home with his wife and daughter along the Umtali/Melsetter road. He came to a low roadblock made of stones; he tried to ram it; the car turned over; Oberholzer was stabbed to death; his assailants dispersed when another vehicle approached. Police found two notes at the site of the attack. One read “Confrontation Smith. Crocodile Gang will soon kill all whites. Beware!” The other read: “Crocodile Group in Action. We shall kill all whites if they don't want to give back our country. Confrontation!”

How are we to read the significance of July 4? The events have been described in five main sources and they look very different from these varying perspectives. “What is Truth?” asks Ndabaningi Si thole, in the earliest of the sources. The Crocodile Gang's killing of Oberholzer constitutes a historical equivalent to the famous old Japanese film, Rashomon, with its presentation of different but equally plausible narratives of a violent event.

Reliable data relating to Buganda's pre-1800 past has come to historians in the form of a thin trickle. Students of more ancient Ganda history have been compelled to rely on the accounts by literate Ganda composed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the work of Apolo Kagwa. The effective usage of these accounts is fraught with difficulties, difficulties which are well-documented in the case of Buganda and which have been explored by, in particular, Wrigley, Kiwanuka, Rowe, and Henige. These writers have justifiably questioned the validity of such recorded political history. The idea that Buganda was governed by a Western-style royal dynasty, with a chronologically-structured succession list, was first put in writing by Speke, who provided the earliest such kinglist.

Over the ensuing forty years this kinglist was gradually lengthened and virtually set in stone, largely through the writings of Kagwa. The explanation of precolonial Ganda government in die terminology of Western constitutional monarchy doubtless served very well the purposes of the new colonial power, which was able to claim that it was merely backing up an extant political organization able to articulate the practices of ‘civilised’ governance. This arrangement also clearly suited the Ganda, as Wrigley and Twaddle have suggested. Both authors incisively argue that the Ganda kinglist was manipulated to meet the challenges of the colonial period.

There seems little reason to doubt, and every reason to believe, that the recording of Buganda's more ancient past (for which there is no corroborating written source) was indeed often carefully engineered to produce the desired results. The attempt to ‘clarify’ local power struggles, the legitimization of particular claims to authority, and die opportunity to provide the world with the definitive account of one's own ‘national history’ (an opportunity, surely, which few could resist) were all factors which have combined to demand skepticism among historians concerning the historicity of ‘traditional’ accounts.

Any meaningful assessment of biography and autobiography writing among the Swahili as a historical source needs to take at least three factors into consideration. The first is the influence of Arab literary traditions on the emergence of the genre on the East African coast; the second is the relationship between literacy and orality, and its implication for writing and narration in an African context. The role of colonialism, and the introduction of the Western “mode” of biography and autobiography writing, forms the third factor. The aim of the paper is to survey these factors, not chronologically, but as part of a general discussion on the notion and status of the genre in the Swahili context.

Swahili interface with Arabic as an essential ingredient of Islamic practice laid the foundation for the development of literate genres on the East African coast, among them the biographical and the historical. In the process, Swahili adopted styles of narrative expression which are reflected in the terms employed for them. The most common are habari (from the Arabic khabar) and wasifu (from wasf). In its original usage, khabar denoted a description of an event or events that were connected in a single narrative by means of a phrase such as “in that year.” It lacked a genealogy of narrators, and the form was stylistically flexible to include verses of poetry relevant to the events. In Swahili the current meaning of the word habari is “information” and “news” (and, hence, also a greeting) but, as a historical genre, it has been used in two ways. The first is in relation to the history of the city-states recounted through documents whose titles include the word, khabari/habari, (or the plural, akhbar in Arabic), usually translated as “chronicle(s).”

The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

In the initial paragraph of a set of book reviews dealing with a sixteenth-century relation and a map by Ptolemy, Michel Doortmont informs us casually that:

Quite a statement! How arrogant and how gratuitously insulting to all those who do study “ancient and early modern history.” If Doortmont were alone in his views, one might just as well ignore this as an example of regretable idiosyncrasy. But the cavalier way in which he delivers his opinion suggests that he merely voices a truism, i.e., an opinion that he thinks is shared by most of his colleagues. Moreover, such a statement will surely frighten budding scholars away, which in itself is a good reason not to let such a sweeping condemnation of the study of earlier African history pass without comment.

Four main claims are made here: (a) a dichotomy and a contrast exists between those who who study the more remote past and those who study the recent past; (b) the first group is small and out of the mainstream; (c) its research yields disappointing results; (d) its scholarship lacks seriousness and method—with (b) and (c) of course in implicit contrast to the second group.

The Esan who presently inhabit four local government areas of Edo State, Nigeria, share an exclusive feeling of being one people. In language and custom they are akin to the Edo people of Benin. The name “Esan” is an Edo word meaning “jump” or “flee,” which explains the manner in which they departed the Benin kingdom. The Esan region is divided roughly into the plateau—about one-third the total area but containing three-fifths of the people—and the lowlands. The plateau chiefdoms, originally seven of them, have been classed as Esan ‘A’ and include Irrua, Ekpoma, Uromi, Ewu, Ubiaja, Udo, and Ugboha. The lowland chief doms, originally eight, are known as Esan ‘B’ and consist of Ewohimi (Orikhimi), Ohordua, Emu, Ebelle, Okalo, Amahor, Ezen, and Okaigun.

According to Esan traditions all the ancestors of the people, royal and commoner alike, came from Benin, the first groups being escapees and pioneers, the royal groups coming into the region later, during the reign of Ewuare, ca. 1455-82. Closer interviewing of clans, neither royal nor holding titles, demonstrates that many do not hold to this popular tradition, claiming either to be indigenous or to have migrated from elsewhere. Even in the intelligence report on the Esan, a significant number of clans reported origins other than in Benin. It seems that Esan ‘A’ chiefdoms on the plateau were the earliest established, and paid tribute to Benin through the Onojie (chief) of Irrua, who was therefore roughly the paramount of the Esan province of Benin. As the chiefdoms grew in numbers and spread on to the lowlands, he remained their overlord or governor. However, by the early nineteenth century the Oba of Benin installed the chief of Ewohimi as paramount over the lowland or Esan ‘B’ chiefdoms. By the advent of the British in the 1890s the earliest fifteen chiefdoms had grown to thirty.