Nupe Zam

Nupe is made up of several tribal sections. Professor S.F. Nadel, who called them Nupe subtribes, listed up to ten such Nupe tribal sections as follows: Ebi, Gbidi or Gbidigi, Kusopa, Binu, Dibo or Zhitako or Ganagana, Kiadia, Ebagi, Bataci, Kupa, and Cekpa, etc.
After Nadel, we now know that many other tribal sections need to be included in the overall Nupe fold including the Bassange, the Kakanda, the Kupa, the Kame, the Nupe Zam, the entire Abawa complex, etc., etc.
We also shouldn’t forget the fact that until just before the advent of the Colonial Europeans some people that we see as completely different from the Nupe people today were actually part and parcel of the Nupe Nation. These include the Gwari, the Kambari, the Oku, the Yoruba, etc. In this edition we featured only the Gwari for now.
In any case, the differences between most tribal sections are in terms of dialects and, accordingly, most of the Nupe tribal sections are mutually intelligible even if just faintly or barely intelligible. But the difference is marked in some cases that the Nupe tribal sections are completely unintelligible to one another. Bini, Ebi, Kakanda, for instance, are completely unintelligible one to the other.
This book is not a work on the linguistic variation of the various Nupe tribal sections but is actually a rigorous attempt at the histories of each of the various Nupe tribal sections. The histories presented in this book are those concerned with the pre-Colonial era which in most cases are completely unknown to even the Nupe people. Most of what is available today as the histories of these Nupe tribal sections are actually meagre information reconstructed through the wild imaginations of colonial historians and scribes most of which are, of course, wrong.
No work has ever attempted a detailed pre-Colonial history of any of the Nupe tribal sections on the scale and scope carried out in this book. As a matter of fact, the pre-Colonial histories of almost all the Nupe tribal sections are unknown today because nobody has ever attempted compiling them in details as is available in this present book.