Professor O. E. Uya: Ethnicity in Nigeria & the concept of Old Calabar

Prof. Uya instructs: “The notion of being Ibibio, or being Igbo, or Hausa-Fulani or Yoruba, is a very recent phenomenon in the history of Nigeria. Nigerians knew themselves in terms of their place of origin: ‘I am from Calabar!' Not, ‘I am Efik’. And ‘I’m from Calabar’ doesn’t mean ‘I was born in Calabar’, it means, ‘I have lived in Calabar’. . . . There was no fixity in terms of ethnicity, in many parts of Africa. The fixity came with the colonial period, where they decided that to administer you, you must have a chief. And in this area, the chiefs were not there! So you had to create chiefs. And you create chiefs for people, so ‘you are now Ibibio, and because you are Ibibio, you must have a chief’, and so on. In Oron we have a concept called ‘Ibibi-Oro’. Or if you were very elegant, they called you ‘Efik-Oro’. [There was a fluid concept of ‘ethnicity’]. Calabar is a melting pot of cultures. Ekpo masquerade is typical of Ibibio people, and it wasn’t played in Oron until the 1930s, and in Oron it was never an instrument of government, but is used as entertainment. Once the House of Chiefs was created in 1952, the Quas wanted a representative chief, and the Quas and Efiks began to quarrel for the first time in history. These are political struggles that have no cultural value in Calabar.
Up to 1956 people of Usagade used to come to Oron for join community meetings. In the 1950s when I came to Calabar, there were more Igbo people in Calabar than Ibibio people.
By the 1830s, the concept of Old Calabar had expanded into Umon, Oron, and Bakassi. The Dairy of Antera Duke describes that the notion of Old Calabar had expanded tremendously through the trade of Efiks.
The story of Calabar is yet to be told, because of the unwillingness of people here to talk about it. An Efik person will not write the history of Calabar, but only of the Efik people. Author E.U. Aye was not a historian, he was a geographer, yet he wrote about Efik history (to the exclusion of the other groups). Another writer named Akak was a ‘social commentator’, and not even a good one. Monday Noah was Uya’s student at Howard University. Many historians in Calabar have confined themselves to the English records, and not bothered with the documents in Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French. There are a lot of gaps in Efik history!"