ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth-century Benin kingdom, gerontocratic principles were most explicitly manifested in the structures and processes of village government. The crucial point of difference between patrimonialism and gerontocracy lies, as Weber observed, in the basis of the relationship between the holders of authority and those who are bound to obey it. Where gerontocracy obtains, governors and governed share equal membership rights, in the corporate group whose boundaries define the area over which authority is exercised. A primary characteristic of patrimonialism is that 'governmental offices originate in the household administration of the ruler'. The dominant positions in the government of the nineteenth-century Benin kingdom were occupied by the Oba and his appointed officials of the Eghaebho n'Ore and Eghaebho n'Ogbe orders. The interplay of patrimonial and gerontocratic ideas is particularly explicit in a final phase of the title-taking procedure, of which two phases have already been distinguished.
