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Mbakara is a word in the Annang, Efik and Ibibio languages used for those in the Western world (Waddell 1891). Rather than be seen as a normative category, it is the description of a relationship between Africans in the West African coast of Calabar and their European counterparts from the West with whom they traded. The name Mbakara has been interpreted by various writers as a shortened form of the phrase Mbaka nkara in Annang and Ibibio meaning "divide and rule". Among those groups, as elsewhere, Westerners came to be identified with colonialism.