Some Ibibio Folk-Tales

DURING the years that I was an Administrative Officer in the British Colonial Civil Service, stationed among the Ibibio of the Calabar Province, I collected a few of the folk-tales which I now present. The Ibibio number about a million souls and comprise most of the population of the Calabar province of eastern Nigeria. There is no name by which they refer to themselves as a tribal group, and the name Agbisherea by which they were known to the early European traders has entirely disappeared. The tribe consists of a number of autonomous, acephalous villages. A group with a common name and dialect and customs is referred to as an Iman, e.g. the Uruan or the Ibesikpo. They are subsistence farmers and are controlled by such secret societies as the Ekpo or ancestral ghosts, and the Idiong or diviners. Belief in witchcraft and in the efficacy of the Calabar bean poison ordeal is still strongly held

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