Bondarenko Dmitri M. Homoarchy

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heroes and location of Ekpo represent a traditional source of
opposition. Where all paths to prestige and political
power converge in the capital, Ekpo emphasizes the ritual
importance of the village.
In the meantime, although only the cases of those accused in doing
harm to the whole country and especially to the Oba and his relatives were
investigated at the central, all-Benin court, the Oba was recognized as not
merely the supreme judge but also the only legitimate lawgiver. This was so
not only due to his recognition by the subjects as their master in the sense
described in section 3 of chapter 3, but first and foremost because the Binis saw
the laws as not really “given” by the Oba but rather as his authoritative
translations to them of the ancestors’ behests, uncorrupted even slightly due to
the sovereign’s maximal spiritual proximity to the true lawgivers in the Binis’
minds – the ancestors. However, though for the Binis the ancestors were the
ultimate source of laws, in reality the regulations were rooted in community
norms and traditions. Due to this new laws met no insurmountable barriers on
their way from the Oba’s palace to communalists’ houses.
In the period under immediate consideration in this work the country
consisted not only of chiefdoms, autonomous local communities and –
seldom – equal in rights unions of communities (Egharevba 1952: 26; 1965:
12) as before but also of the units of a new type, in which both the
strengthening of the central authority compared to the Ogiso time and its still
ambiguous position in the Benin multipolity revealed themselves. This new
institution was a group of communities under the leadership of a paramount
chief, like chiefdoms, but the genesis of that socio-political unit was completely
different. Such units started to appear from the reign of the first Oba in the
result of the supreme ruler’s grants of communities to all-Benin chiefs and
royal relatives (Egharevba 1956: 31; Bradbury 1957: 33; 1973: 177). The
territorial expansion and titled chiefs’ involvement in politically and financially
profitable relations with Europeans contributed much to the “pseudochiefdoms”
appearance in later historical periods (Ryder 1969). The titled chiefs were
those who exercised the supreme power over communities and chiefdoms
through the community and chiefdom heads in the name of the Oba. While
chiefdom heads were more powerful farther from the capital their estates were
due to their personal enterprise, the Oba himself granted pseudochiefdom heads
more prerogatives more distant from Benin City the territory lay (Bradbury
1973: 150; Imoagene 1990: 28). The pseudochiefdom heads were to
compensate, “voluntarily” or “in the performance of the duty”, the central
power’s insufficient strength in the country’s outskirts. Such units’ number
especially increased in the time of Benin’s active expansion (mid-15 th – early
17 th centuries).
It goes without saying that this system had nothing essential in common
with the feudal one, being realized in a society to which private landownership