Ward Organization among the Yakö

Abstract

The Yakö of the Middle Cross River area of Obubra Division in SE. Nigeria live in five compact villages a few miles apart, each of which was formerly autonomous in its political as well as its ritual organization. They have a common tradition that their forebears all came from Okuni, a settlement some 50 miles away up the Cross River, from which they came overland, for they were not river people, in several parties and over some years. Among the Yakö settlements distinction is made between those in which the original migrants settled—that is, Idomi, where stopped a section of the main group which founded Umor, Umor itself, and the separately settled community of Nko—and the remaining villages of Ekuri and Nkpani which are held to have been founded a generation or two later by local migrations, following dissensions, from Umor.