Ekpe, called Mgbe by the Ejagham and recorded in early colonial writing under the older spelling Egbo, is a graded men's title society of the Cross River basin in southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon, practiced among the Efik, Ejagham, Igbo and several neighboring peoples. Its authority rests on the leopard spirit Ekpe, whose voice is impersonated in masked performance and stands as the society's highest symbol of legitimate power. Members advance through a ladder of purchased and earned grades, each granting deeper knowledge of the society's law and ritual, and its senior titleholders historically functioned as the effective government of the small, fiercely independent city states of the Cross River, most famously Old Calabar, in a region where no single kingdom ever united the whole basin.
Ekpe developed alongside Nsibidi, an indigenous ideographic script used to record the society's proceedings and mark its authority in public space, a system P. Amaury Talbot documented during his 1912 ethnographic survey of the region. Ekpe's judicial reach extended to enforcing trade agreements and debts between city states that had no other shared authority to appeal to, making it as much a regional court and merchant guarantee system as a religious fraternity.
Ekpe remains a living institution today, with lodges continuing to induct titled members across the Cross River region, and its influence reaches well beyond Nigeria and Cameroon through the diaspora tradition described in the companion article on Abakua.