Calabar

Calabar began as a cluster of Efik settlements on the east bank of the Calabar River, founded by people who moved down from the Cross River and split into towns — Creek Town, Duke Town, Henshaw Town and others — each under its own ruling house. From the 17th century these towns grew rich as middlemen in the Atlantic slave trade, selling captives brought from the interior to European ships anchored in the river; the Bight of Biafra was one of the busiest stretches of the whole trade. Efik chiefs kept elaborate correspondence in English, and the diary of Antera Duke, written in the 1780s, survives as a rare African account of the period.

When the slave trade was suppressed, palm oil replaced it, and the delta earned its old name, the Oil Rivers. Scottish Presbyterians opened a mission in 1846, schools followed, and Mary Slessor arrived in 1876 and worked in the Cross River interior until her death in 1915. Britain made Calabar the administrative centre of the Oil Rivers and later the Niger Coast Protectorate, and the town was the seat of government for the Southern Nigeria protectorate before that role passed to Lagos in 1906.

The 20th century moved trade away: the railway went elsewhere, Port Harcourt took the shipping, and Calabar became a provincial capital. It was fought over during the civil war and taken by federal forces in 1967. It has been the state capital throughout, of Cross River State since the 1976 renaming, and from the late 1990s state governments have promoted it as a tourist city, laying out new roads, backing the carnival from 2004 and building the Tinapa complex north of town.

Calabar is an Efik city with Qua (Ejagham) and Efut communities alongside, and each keeps its own palace, festivals and history. The Obong of Calabar is the paramount Efik ruler, and the Ekpe or leopard society, an old institution that once enforced law and debt between trading houses, still initiates members and sends masqueraders through the streets on ceremonial days; the nsibidi symbols used by Ekpe and the related Mgbe society are an indigenous script of the old Cross River region.

The city is strongly Christian and mission-shaped. Presbyterian churches, schools named for missionaries and the graves in Duke Town record a long Scottish connection, and choral singing is taken seriously. Efik ceremonial dress — women in wrappers and beads, men in long shirts with hats and canes — appears at weddings and chieftaincy events, and the fattening room, a period of seclusion and instruction before marriage, survives as a much-reduced custom.

Since 2004 the carnival has become the city's defining event, with bands rehearsing for months and thousands of costumed dancers parading in late December before crowds that fill the streets. The whole of December is treated as a festival season. Calabar is also known within Nigeria for its relative order and cleanliness, a point of local pride, and for a slower, more ceremonious manner than Lagos or Port Harcourt.

Calabar's two local government areas held 371,022 people at the 2006 census and an estimated 571,500 in 2022, the built-up area spreading north along the roads towards Tinapa and Odukpani. It is a government and university city: the state administration, the University of Calabar, a teaching hospital, the seaport and a free trade zone are the main employers, alongside trade, transport and a hotel sector that exists largely for December.

Households live between the two halves of the city — the older, denser Calabar South running down to the river, and the newer estates on the plateau. Electricity is unreliable, generators are common, and water comes from boreholes in many compounds. Fishing families work the Calabar and Great Kwa rivers, and food arrives from the farms of the interior along roads that flood in the wet season.

The day begins early with markets and school runs, thins through the hot afternoon and picks up again in the evening around the grills and bars on the main roads. Unemployment among young people is high and many leave for Lagos, Abuja or abroad. The loss of the Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon, completed in 2008, cost the state territory and coastline and is still felt in the city, where many displaced families settled.

Calabar is regarded across Nigeria as a centre of good cooking, and its two famous soups travel everywhere. Afang soup combines shredded wild afang leaves with soft waterleaf, palm oil, meat, dried fish and periwinkles; edikang ikong is made with fluted-pumpkin leaves and waterleaf in a rich, meaty base. Both are eaten with a swallow — pounded yam, garri, or fufu — taken by hand.

Beyond the soups, ekpang nkukwo is a laborious dish of grated cocoyam wrapped in cocoyam leaves and simmered in a spicy palm-oil broth, and edita ikpan and other Efik preparations appear at ceremonies. The rivers supply the kitchen: fish and prawn pepper soup, periwinkles picked from their shells with a pin, and crayfish ground into almost everything. Roasted plantain with pepper sauce, and yam porridge cooked with palm oil and vegetables, are everyday food.

Street eating follows the Nigerian pattern — akara bean fritters and pap in the morning, moin moin steamed bean pudding, suya skewers from evening grills — and Calabar's bakeries turn out bread that Nigerians buy to take home. Palm wine is tapped in the villages nearby and ogogoro, distilled from palm sap, is the traditional spirit; beer, malt drinks, zobo and chapman fill the bars.