The forest peoples of the upper Cross River and the Oban hills, who call themselves Ejagham, govern themselves through village councils and the Ekpe (leopard) society, and are the likely inventors of Nsibidi - an indigenous West African ideographic script. Their Ekpe institution spread downriver to Old Calabar and, with the slave trade, to Cuba as Abakua.
Not an ending: the Anglo-German border cut Ejagham country in two in the 1890s and the German-Ekoi war of 1899-1904 broke resistance on the eastern side, while the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria took the western side from 1900. Ejagham communities still straddle the Nigeria-Cameroon border in Cross River State and Manyu Division.
The classic ethnography of the Ekoi/Ejagham by the officer who surveyed the Oban district; the first published account of Nsibidi. Full text open on the Internet Archive.
Four-volume survey with tribal areas and populations for the Cross River peoples, including the Ekoi divisions.