Esan Erotic

The Esan are an Edoid people of south-central Nigeria, settled across the rolling savanna and forest edge of Esanland in present-day Edo State. They number somewhere over a million, organized historically into roughly thirty-some autonomous kingdoms — Uromi, Irrua, Ekpoma, Ubiaja, Igueben and others — each headed by an Onojie, a hereditary ruler whose office still carries weight in local life even where civil administration has long since taken over the formal levers. That polycentric structure is one of the things that distinguishes the Esan from their larger Edo neighbours to the south: there was never a single Esan capital, and the kingdoms were peers rather than provinces.

The language, also called Esan, sits inside the Edoid branch of Niger–Congo and is closely related to Bini (Edo) and Yoruba further west, though not mutually intelligible with either. Tradition holds that the Esan kingdoms emerged in the fifteenth century from people who left Benin during the reign of Oba Ewuare — the name Esan is commonly glossed from a verb meaning "to flee" or "to jump away," a folk etymology Esan themselves repeat. Whether or not the migration story is literal, the cultural debt to Benin is audible in chieftaincy titles, regalia and the grammar of court ritual, even as the Esan kept their kingdoms small and independent of the Oba's authority.

Christianity is the dominant religion today, with Catholic and Pentecostal congregations both well established, but the older cosmology has not been displaced so much as folded under. Ancestor veneration runs through funerals, which remain among the most elaborate Esan observances — a senior person's burial is expected to be deferred, sometimes for months, while family members raise the means for a second, public ceremony that is the real social funeral. The first burial puts the body in the ground; the second sends the person into the company of the ancestors. Age-grade societies (otu) still organize men's communal labour and ritual responsibilities in many villages, and yam, palm wine and kola feature in the rites that accompany marriage and title-taking.

Esanland is also farming country in the older sense — yam, cassava, oil palm, rubber — and the region has produced a disproportionate share of Nigeria's military officers, judges and academics, a reputation locals tend to mention without much modesty.