Fishing and salt-making island towns of the eastern delta, among the mangroves of the Brass, Sombreiro, New Calabar and Bonny estuaries.
The trading city-states with their kings (amanyanabo) and canoe houses, Nembe, Elem Kalabari, Okrika and Bonny, grew in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries with the Atlantic trade; their king lists begin in the sixteenth century. In 1200 their ancestors live in fishing settlements that trade salt and fish up the rivers to the Igbo for yams. Settlement mounds in this region (Ke near Degema, Onyoma near Nembe and others) were excavated by Nzewunwa and Anozie in the 1970s and show long occupation reaching back before 1200.
Who holds it
- Title
- Town heads and elders
- Since
- not pinned
- Confidence
- low
How things stand that morning
Self-governing.
Customs
Fishing, salt boiling by evaporation, canoe trade inland.
Assemblies
Town elders.
What the year holds
What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.
- 1200No dated event.Depends on: Not applicable Stopped by: Not applicable
Where the sources disagree
- The exact radiocarbon dates of Ke and Onyoma are not checked here; the campaign should treat 'before 1200' as the safe statement.
Evidence: Tradition and the mound excavations, whose individual dates we could not check here.
On the map: A people's country drawn as a dashed outline; borders are approximate.
Sources and studies
- Wikipedia, Kalabari Kingdom
- From the researcher's knowledge of the ethnography and oral traditions (Alagoa, Afigbo, Isichei, Forde and Jones, Bradbury); used only as a guide to who lived where
Last revised 4 November 2026. Published 4 November 2026. Suggest a correction on the OMNIA Discord.