Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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recognized the Ogisos’ supremacy but treated the Ogisos “almost as primus
inter pares” (Eweka, E.B. 1992: 7). It is reasonable to suppose that the titles
(and corresponding duties) were introduced and established by local (simplechiefdom)
rulers as a result of a series of political compromises both among
themselves and among them and the Ogisos in the process of struggle for
power. The situation with the earliest title-holders also demonstrates that
strictly speaking, for long periods of time there was no permanent, stable
“center of force” at all. Instead at different moments various “parts of the
whole” played this part: chiefdoms changed each other on the top of the
political hierarchy.
So, in the Ogiso period chiefdoms and autonomous (i.e., not forming
parts of any chiefdom within the kingdom) communities co-existed within the
complex chiefdom (though strictly speaking, the theory presupposes that a
complex chiefdom consists of simple chiefdoms only, the historical realities of
Benin do not contradict but specify it). The suprachiefdom authority was rather
weak, and struggle between simple chiefdoms for supremacy in the Benin
complex chiefdom was a normal course of events, and the whole socio-political
system, though it clearly tended to be framed as homoarchic, was rather weak
and friable. Nevertheless, although in the final analysis the Ogisos turned out
incapable to establish a really effective central authority, just
[t]he Ogiso era established a common social sense of
belonging to the same authority and hence the sharing of a
common goal, purpose or destiny. The rise of the Ogisos
implanted monarchical traditions into the Benin political
system. This monarchical idea survived in spite of
stresses, temporary aberration in the kingship, the failure
of the system and its substitution with republicanism.
This was to give the Benin structure its basic social and
political pattern which was crystallised under the Obas
(Igbafe 1975: 7).
In this, anthropological, respect the process of the institution of kingship’s
consolidation was evolutionary, not revolutionary (see Ibid.). “... [I]n Benin
there was no sudden transformation of the political structure coinciding with
the advent of the dynasty” of the Obas (Ryder 1967: 31), though historically,
the eventual downfall of the Ogisos was provoked by a severe all-sided crisis
during several last reigns while the start of the first Oba’s reign was preceded
by a period of interregnum.
Eventually, presumably in the 13 th century, the Second dynasty came to
power in Benin. Its founder, Prince Oranmiyan, originated from Ife: for the
Benin people only a man from that town could be a legitimate new dynasty
founder, as Ife was the foremotherland of the institution of suprachiefdom
authority in Benin as such – from there the First dynasty founder Igodo had
arrived in Biniland. So, the authority of Oranmiyan and his descendants was to