Becoming Igbo: ethnicity in motion

Korieh’s chapter “Igbo Identity in Africa and the Atlantic Diaspora” argues that Igbo ethnicity was layered, fluid and partly ascribed from outside. Inside Igboland, people belonged to a lineage, a village or a group of villages. The missionary linguist Sigismund Koelle, working with recaptives in Sierra Leone, claimed that many had not known the name “Igbo” before. Dr William Baikie wrote in the 1850s that at home each person named his district, but abroad all were Igbo.

Michael Gomez argued that Igbo ethnicity “matured very rapidly” in North American slavery, as people from different communities met in the same plantation labour gangs and found that they shared a language. Philip Morgan and Douglas Chambers call this process ethnogenesis. Equiano’s “my own nation” in the Narrative shows an earlier stage, in which “nation” meant the Igbo-speaking community of a ship or an estate.

Others warn against projecting a modern unity backwards. Elizabeth Isichei observed that Igbo have no single origin myth, and the Igbo society of the interior was organized mainly by village assemblies (Igbo enwe eze, “the Igbo have no king”). Kings did exist at Onitsha, Oguta, Nri and elsewhere, so the “stateless” label is a simplification.

In Igbo each hails from his district, but abroad all are Igbo.

Dr William Baikie, 1850s, as quoted in Korieh (2009), ch. 13

Stereotypes followed the ethnonym. Planters in Jamaica and elsewhere described “Ibos” as despondent, suicide-prone and unreliable, while in St Domingue Moreau de Saint-Méry noted their mutual solidarity. Korieh treats these reputations with caution: they were created by slaveholders and cannot be read as a reliable description of Igbo behaviour.