ABSTRACT
The early historical material for the area between the Cross River and the Cameroons Estuary is full of ambiguities. Dapper (1668) and Barbot (1732) between them imposed upon the seventeenth century a canonical scheme. Peoples such as Ambozi and Calbongos dominate the scene, and many of us have been tempted to try to interpret at its face value a system of toponymy which derives in part from a corrupt manuscript tradition, and in part from the compilation of a few independent sources into layer upon layer of variants. This paper attempts to unravel some of the tangle, and by the addition of as yet unconsidered sources to advance the matter a little further from the point reached in the original scholarly study by Bouchaud (1952), the standard work in this field.
