Edem

The group belongs to the northern section of the eastern uplands, the early settlement area whose centre lay at or near Nsukka.

Inside a sub-lineage the senior elder (Onyishi) handles disputes and questions of custom; each village is run by a council of its component sub-lineage heads, chaired by the senior lineage's head, and its decisions are executed by title-holders (Asogwa) with the help of minor titled officers (Ndishi Izvu).

Afigbo records that Edem stood at the centre of a late nineteenth-century confederation of village-groups that also took in Okpuje, Orobo and Ede, whose official charter made Edem, Orobo and Ede the settlements of three brothers, sons of Ugwuanyi. Okpuje was admitted not as kin but as an old friend, the bond being sealed when a blacksmith welded the two rulers' ancestral iron staffs into one and the single staff was then cut in two.