Canoe house system emerges in Bonny and Elem Kalabari

By the end of the seventeenth century the canoe house system had emerged in both Bonny and Elem Kalabari. A canoe house was a lineage branch wealthy enough to equip a war canoe of fifty soldiers, used both to serve the state and to procure more slaves, into which slaves could be assimilated and even rise to head the house.