PEOPLE

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Benin is an ancient African kingdom located in what is today south-west Nigeria. It is one of the oldest and most advanced states in the hinterland of Africa, established around the 1000 AD, and lasting until it was colonized by the British Empire in 1897. The heart of the old Benin kingdom is occupied by a people who refer to themselves, their capital city, the kingdom, and their language as Edo although ‘Bini’ was used by the earliest Europeans as an adjective and for the dominant people of the kingdom and their language.   

The Edo form part of a much larger linguistic group which ethnographers and anthropologists have classified as the ‘Edo-speaking’ group of peoples. The Edo speaking peoples inhabited an area extending from the broken hills bordering the Igbirra and Igala people in the north, (in the present-day Nigerian states of Kogi, Kwara and Benue), to the edge of the mangrove swamp in the coastal south, where their neighbours are the Ijaw and Itsekiri (present-day Delta and Rivers states of Nigeria). To the west the Benin Kingdom shared boundaries with the Yoruba speaking people of present-day Ondo and Ekiti states, and to the east with the Igbo speaking people of South-eastern Nigeria where the boundary was demarcated by the River Niger.   

The earliest social anthropologists who carried out extensive research on the people divided them into four major territorial sections which are distinct from each other in certain linguistic, social, and other cultural features. The sections were as follows:   

a. The Edo proper (Bini): who speak Edo, the official language of Benin City and the Kingdom. 

b. The Esan (Ishan): who occupied the area north-east of Benin City. 

c. The Northern Edo: made up of the Akoko Edo, the Ivbiosakon, the Etsako, the Ora and the Uneme. 

d. The Urhobo and Isoko: who lived in the Niger Delta.   

Other ethnographic studies included groups such as the Engenni of present-day Rivers State of Nigeria, the Ika who can be found today scattered between Edo and Delta States, the Ukwani who lived on the banks of River Niger, and the inhabitants of the north-western part of present-day Edo State whose linguistic and cultural traits bore close resemblance to the Yoruba of Ondo State. It is therefore safe to conclude that the remnants of the Kingdom of Benin can today be found across 5 states in modern Nigeria including Edo, Delta, Ondo, Ekiti and Rivers.   

There is linguistic evidence that suggests that the Edo people have occupied this region for some thousands of years in relative isolation, with the result that their language and neighbouring ones of the West Atlantic family, and even some of the dialects within the Edo group, have become mutually unintelligible. Language is not, however, the only cultural feature which the Edo-speaking peoples have in common.   

Dr. R. E. Bradbury, the first social anthropologist to work on the art, history and culture of Benin indicated three important characteristics of social organisation that distinguish all their communities, whether large or small. The first of these was the village settlement as the basic geo-political unit. Second, within the village the male population is organised into age-grades usually three in number which represent the fundamental pattern of authority. And third was the kinship and lineage organisation that is marked with patrilineal bias and an emphasis upon primogeniture.    

However, this relatively simple pattern of organisation was overlaid by the development of kingship, chieftaincy systems and a more complex political system which developed with the kingdom of Benin as a centralizing authority and expanded to encroach upon some parts of Yoruba areas in the west while embracing many of the Igbo speaking peoples living to the west of the River Niger.