Politically each village was governed by its chief and its elders, oftentimes in complete independence.

In occasional instances, however, considerable states of loose organization were under the rule of central authorities.

Such states were likely to be the creation of invaders from the eastward, the Dahomans and Ashantees for example; but the kingdom of Benin appears to have arisen indigenously.

In many cases the subordination of conquered villages merely resulted in their paying annual tribute.

As to language, Lower Guinea spoke multitudinous dialects of the one Bantu tongue, but in Upper Guinea there were many dialects of many separate languages.
Land was so abundant and so little used industrially that as a rule it was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little occasion to mark the limits of their domains.