Briga News Nigeria
✓The ancient politics of centring and the reality of decentering
History is not only written in palaces and courts. It is also written in water, in the creeks, and in the cadence of the oldest tongues. It is significant to raise the sacred point that Edo State today is not the inheritance of one people. It is a federation of indigenous nations — Bini, Ijaw, Esan, Etsako, Owan and Akoko-Edo — _none of whom were borrowed, captured as slaves, or annexed as tenants to create the state_. They are original peoples with kingdoms, genealogies, and geographies that predate the colonial pen that drew the boundaries of 1991.
Today it has become so glaring that there exists a contested space between the _Benin imperial imagination_ and _Ijaw sovereignty_. To call Ijaw “tenants” in Edo State is to read history backwards: to place the later claim of empire above the deeper fact of settlement. The central drama of this region is therefore not landlord and tenant, but _between settlement and sovereignty_ — two political worlds meeting on the same land and water.
States in Nigeria were not created by conquest. They were created by criteria: population, contiguity, and economic viability. When Edo State was excised from Bendel in 1991, it did not invent its peoples. It recognised them. No ethnic nation was imported to serve another. Each was already resident, with ancestral stools, ancestral farms, and ancestral creeks.
Historical Context and Competing Perspectives.
The question of who inhabited the territories surrounding the Benin Kingdom before the consolidation of Bini political authority remains a subject of historical debate. Chief Jacob U. Egharevba, in his account of Benin history, records that “tradition says that they met some people who were in the land before their arrival.” This establishes a pre-Bini presence in what is now known as Edo State.
From the perspective of Ijaw oral tradition, communities and clans such as the Olodiama, Okomu, and Egbema are regarded as longstanding indigenous populations whose settlements and institutions predated the expansion of Bini political influence. This position is reinforced, in the view of its proponents, by the distinctive linguistic, cultural, social, and customary traditions of these riverine communities.
European records and colonial observations provide another dimension to the debate. Accounts associated with nineteenth-century explorers and officials, including Consul Richard Burton’s observations of the Benin River and its surrounding waterways, describe a complex network of riverine settlements and communities engaged in fishing, navigation, and coastal trade. Such accounts suggest that the waterways along the western Niger Delta were inhabited by culturally and linguistically diverse populations whose identities were not necessarily synonymous with those of the inland Bini.
Earlier Portuguese encounters with the West African coast likewise point to the importance of riverine and coastal peoples in facilitating maritime commerce and movement between the interior and the Atlantic littoral. While Portuguese records often employed broad and sometimes imprecise labels for such communities, they nevertheless indicate that political authority in the inland Benin kingdom coexisted with distinct populations inhabiting the creeks, estuaries, and coastal margins.
Colonial administrative records from the twentieth century further contributed to the differentiation of these communities. Intelligence reports and ethnographic assessments sought to document the social organisation, customary institutions, languages, and religious practices of groups such as the Olodiama, Okomu, and Egbema. Ijaw historians and advocates interpret these records as evidence of distinct and historically rooted riverine societies.
Taken together, these traditions and records reveal a historically complex landscape in which Bini political expansion, Ijaw settlement traditions, and other indigenous populations intersected over several centuries. The available evidence supports the existence of established communities in the region before and alongside the arrival of the Bini and their expansion of political authority. The debate, therefore, is best approached through a critical comparison of oral traditions, archival materials, archaeological evidence, linguistic studies, and colonial records rather than through reliance on any single historical narrative.
The Benin Kingdom, with an imperialistic vision, dominated the centre of the state. Under its influential throne, the Oba centralised ritual authority and projected power through diplomacy. Yet empire is not the same as monopoly. Edo State has always been a constellation. The Esan raised Onojies in Irrua and Uromi. The Etsako, Owan, and Akoko-Edo built confederacies in the hills. And in the south, where the rivers meet the sea, _the five Ijaw kingdoms of Edo State — Egbema, Olodiama, Ukomu, Furupagha and Gbaraun — governed their own waters_. To speak of Edo State is therefore to speak of plurality held together, not of one kingdom absorbing the rest.
A state that cannot feed itself cannot stand. _A significant portion of the economy that sustains Edo State flows from Ijaw land_ — the fisheries that feed markets, the riverine trade routes that predate roads, and the oil and gas that underwrite budgets. Logic demands this: you do not call the contributors who make a state viable “tenants” in that state. You call them stakeholders. The wealth of the Ovia riverine areas is not tribute. It is commonwealth, drawn from the territory of an indigenous nation.
Here history must listen to language, for language is the oldest archive. Linguistic scholarship places _Ijoid as a first-generation branch of the Niger-Congo family_. It diverged before Benue-Congo. While Edo, Esan, and Yoruba share a later ancestry, Ijaw speaks from an older root. It is _the oldest distinct language group in the Niger Delta
Historical scholarship affirms what language suggests. _E.J. Alagoa_ demonstrates that Ijaw communities have occupied the coastal and riverine Niger Delta for millennia, with complex socio-political institutions that predate many inland kingdoms. Their world was built on water, not on conquest of the hinterland.
Myth remembers what archives forget. In Ijaw cosmology, the world began not on land but on water. The Ijaw ancestors of Edo State had occupied the creeks and were given their canoes before any king raised a palace. When the Benin envoy came down the river with beads and bronze, he did not find an empty shore waiting for a landlord. He found fishermen who already named every bend, priests who already propitiated the river, and kings who already settled disputes under the mangrove. The story told in Egbema, Olodiama, Ukomu, Furupagha and Gbaraun is not of arrival, but of meeting: _two powers recognising each other across different elements — one of the forest, one of the water_. To call the people of the water “tenants” after such a meeting is to mistake hospitality for surrender, and to forget that the river was flowing long before the crown was cast.
From this follows an unavoidable question: _How can the oldest language group in the Delta, with the deepest time-depth in the region, be cast as “tenants” to later-arriving polities?_ Tenancy requires arrival after, and permission granted. The record shows the opposite. Ijaw settlement is anterior. Ijaw sovereignty over creeks and coast is original. Therefore, the “tenancy” claim must be reclassified. It is not a historical fact. It is _a political claim within Benin’s imperial imagination_ — a later court’s attempt to inscribe hierarchy onto a landscape where an older sovereignty already existed.
Sovereignty is not a title granted by another king. It is the daily practice of self-rule. The Ijaw kingdoms of the Edo riverine — Egbema, Olodiama, Ukomu, Furupagha and Gbaraun — governed fishing grounds, mediated trade, and commanded their waterways. They entered treaties with Benin, fought when necessary, and traded when profitable. They did so as polities, not as wards.
Ijaw oral tradition is unanimous: we were never tenants. Where Benin court chronicles speak of permission and tribute, Ijaw memory speaks of alliance and autonomy. Where one archive records hierarchy, the other records parity. This was not subjugation. It was negotiation between two sovereign systems: one organised around a sacred kingship on land, the other organised around kingdoms of the water.
Let us define the terms clearly, for history turns on definitions. _Settlement_ is the long occupation and cultivation of a place. By this measure, all of Edo State’s nations are settlers — and none more ancient in the Delta than Ijaw. _Sovereignty_ is the right to govern land, people, and resources without external veto. By this measure, Ijaw kingdoms exercised it.
Benin projected an imperial vision of a single centre. Ijaw kingdoms practised a dispersed sovereignty of many centres on the rivers. The region’s history was forged in the friction and cooperation between these two logics — coexistence, contestation, and ultimately, cohabitation.
For too long, the historiography and politics of Edo State have suffered from _centering_ — the assumption that because Benin City is the administrative capital, it must also be the epistemic and historical centre of the entire state. From this centre, all other nations are read as periphery, deviation, or, in the most corrosive form, as “tenants”. This is the logic of empire carried into the present.
In the global age this centring has taken new form. It no longer requires armies. It speaks through letterheads, press releases, and the quiet authority of a capital that claims to be the prologue to every other story. This is Benin endocolonialism: the post-colonial practice of administering internal others with the same hierarchical logic, now dressed in protocol. It is the riverine economy that feeds the state, yet the narrative insists the producer is a guest. It is the Ijaw fisherman whose catch feeds the markets and the gas from whose land underwrites the budget, yet he is asked to apply for belonging in his own creek. The tools have changed — certificates instead of conquest, panels instead of palaces — but the assumption remains: geography is destiny, the centre decides, and history begins at one gate.
To correct this we must decenter the centre. To decenter is not to erase Benin history, which remains a great civilisation. It is to refuse its monopoly as the sole lens through which Edo State is read. Chronologically, the story does not begin with empire. Linguistically and historically, Ijaw occupation is anterior. Economically, a significant portion of the state’s viability comes from Ijaw land. Politically, the state is a federation of equals.
Decentering replaces the pyramid with a constellation. It recognises that legitimacy in the 21st century does not flow from hierarchy but from mutual recognition. It acknowledges that Benin is one centre among many, not the sun around which all others orbit. To decenter is therefore not an act of diminishment. It is an act of preservation. States that insist on one history fracture. States that embrace plurality endure.
If the peoples of Edo State had agreed to stay together at the point of the creation of this geopolitical space, then what is the point of reviving ethnocentrism, neo-colonial conquest, ethnic antagonism, and structured oppression against other ethnic groups within the same state? The logic of union presupposes equity, not hierarchy. To invoke “tenancy” after agreeing to a federation is to weaponise history against the very compact that holds us together. Subalternism in this context is a political construct. It is neither cultural, nor geographical, nor economic.It is manufactured in the corridors of power to justify domination. It seeks to reduce sovereign nations to minorities, and minorities to guests, in the land of their ancestors. A federation built on such a premise cannot endure, because it mistakes administration for ownership and protocol for primacy.
The Edo State reality is thus not Benin plus others. It is Benin and Esan and Etsako and Owan and Akoko-Edo and Ijaw together. Ijaw kingdoms — Egbema, Olodiama, Ukomu, Furupagha and Gbaraun — are not tenants in Edo State. They are among the first inhabitants of the Niger Delta, and the land and waters they hold are central to the state’s economic life and viability.
Reframing this history from “tenancy” to “sovereignty” restores chronological accuracy, restores political dignity, and restores a just basis for citizenship. Between Settlement and Sovereignty is therefore the story of how the oldest voice of the Delta and the greatest empire of the forest met, recognised each other, and negotiated belonging in one shared territory. It is not a story of guests. It is a story of neighbours it is a compelling story of the reality of multiple centring not monolithic centring of a peoples palace to decenter the multiple centres of legitimacy..
