This work is a reconstruction of the Pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial history of the Yakurr of South Eastern Nigeria. It is primarily, based on Yakurr Oral Sources. The Study provides a historical foundation hence its title. It is hoped that future historians shall build upon that foundation. However, the work examines the collapse of the Wukari Empire (Jukun/Kororofa) and the development of the Atlantic Slave trade as the principal causal factors of the migrations of the various peoples who now occupy the middle and upper Cross River Regions. Such people include the Yalla, Ukelle (upper Cross River), Boki, Agbo, Bahumono, Mbembe and Yakurr (middle Cross River) region.

From about the middle of the seventeenth century, Calabar emerged as a vibrant entrepot where Europeans traded with coastal merchants to purchase enslaved people and raw materials destined for the Americas and Europe. Referred to as 'Old Calabar' in the historical sources, this busy port was located on the eastern side of the Calabar River at the confluence with the Cross River and was the centre of a vast network of international trade extending to the Grassfields region of Cameroon and to the Benue River valley directly north.

Introduction, Masquerade as an Artistic Pulse of the City -- "Face No Fear Face:" Unmasking Youths -- "If they Burn it Down, We will Build it Even Larger:" Confrontations of Space -- "People Hear at Night:" Sounds and Secrecy of Nocturnal Performance -- "Idagha Chieftaincy was Nothing like what it is today:" The Spectacle of Public Performance -- "We Call it Change:" An Artistic Profile of Artist Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa -- "Look at it, Touch it, Smell it-this is Nnabo:" Trajectories and Transformations of "Warrior" Societies -- "For this Small Money, I No Go Enter Competition:" Masquerade Competition on a Global Stage -- "I know Myself:" Masquerade as an Artistic Transformation -- Coda: "I Think About my Kids and Feeding Them".

In 1988, Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) published La lengua sagrada de los Ñáñigos, an Abakuá phrasebook that is to this day the largest work available on any African diaspora community in the Americas. In the early 1800s in Cuba, enslaved Africans from the Cross River region of southeastern Nigeria and southwestern Cameroon created Abakuá societies for protection and mutual aid. Abakuá rites reenact mythic legends of the institution’s history in Africa, using dance, chants, drumming, symbolic writing, herbs, domestic animals, and masked performers to represent African ancestors. Criminalized and scorned in the colonial era, Abakuá members were at the same time contributing to the creation of a unique Cuban culture, including rumba music, now considered a national treasure. Translated for the first time into English, Cabrera’s lexicon documents phrases vital to the creation of a specific African-derived identity in Cuba and presents the first “insider’s” view of this African heritage. This text presents thoroughly researched commentaries that link hundreds of entries to the context of mythic rites, skilled ritual performance, and the influence of Abakuá in Cuban society and popular music. Generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, the volume includes a new introduction to Cabrera’s writing as well as appendices that situate this important work in Cuba’s history. With the help of living Abakuá specialists in Cuba and the US, Ivor L. Miller and P. González Gómes-Cásseres have translated Cabrera’s Spanish into English for the first time while keeping her meanings and cultivated style intact, opening this seminal work to new audiences and propelling its legacy in African diaspora studies.

First published in 1986. The free market is often associated with liberty and individualism, and this connection has been made for more centuries than is generally realised. This essays collected in this book trace the development, importance and influence of the market as a dominating component of the shared human life from classical antiquity to the present. The authors, from various backgrounds, keep constantly in view the moral and political questions raised by the role of markets, as well as laying out succinctly what can be known or deduced about the actual operation of the market in Western and other cultures. This book will be of interest to students of economics and history.

An eye-opening investigation of the emergence of complex purchasable associations in the Cross River region of southwest Cameroon and southeast Nigeria. These associations emerged in the context of the growing transatlantic hinterland and were disseminated from the direction of the Atlantic coast to the hinterland. Associations form a substantial part of the prestige economy in the Cross River cultures up until the present.

Double Descent and Gender Issues in the Cross River Region of Southeastern Nigeria By: Simon Ottenberg Double Descent and Gender Issues in the Cross River Region of Southeastern Nigeria is a comprehensive study of an unusual form of human descent among a number of societies in Nigeria’s Cross River Region. The author provides an in-depth history and analysis of the variations of regional groups and raises the thought-provoking question of how matrilineal and patrilineal relationships affect a society’s gender relations.

This edited volume provides an interdisciplinary and balanced discussion on the changing dynamics of identities in Africa, with a focus on gender, ethno-cultural, and religious identity.