Benue

This grouping covers the Benue valley and adjacent plateaus, whose leading historical people were the Jukun. By about 1250 Jukun clans had settled along the Gongola, and their state of Kwararafa, or Kororofa, grew into a Benue power under the divine king Aku.

The Kano Chronicle records Kano reaching Kororofa in the fourteenth century, and Kwararafa later turned aggressor, sacking a gate of Kano in 1653 and raiding Katsina and even Bornu before peaking in the later seventeenth century. Decline set in by the late eighteenth century, and Chamba and Fulani attacks in the early nineteenth century broke it up, leaving the Wukari Federation under the Aku Uka as the Jukun heartland.

Sharing the region were the Berom around Jos, speaking a Benue-Congo tongue, and the Mambila of the Nkambe highlands, whose Mambiloid speech belongs to the Northern Bantoid branch.