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.

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.

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.

The Izon of the Niger Delta is a global history of the Izon, Ijo, or Ijaw people from their homelands in the Niger Delta, through Nigeria, the West and Central African coastlands, and in the Africa diaspora into Europe, the America's and the Caribbean. It is a preliminary study which raises questions and opens ground for further research. The book provides chapters that take an overview of issues on the environment of the Niger Delta, an analysis of the Ijo population, the language, culture, resources, history and linkage to the rest of Nigeria and the world. In effect these chapters provide a synopsis of the Ijo in the past and their situation in the present.