Politics, Culture, and Origins in Nigeria : The Igbo and Their Nri Neighbors

Nwankwo Nwaezeigwe’s revelatory study of the Igbo people and their Nri neighbors presents a paradigm shift in the interpretation of Igbo history and culture. British colonial ethnography held that the Nri, who form part of a larger Igbo subgroup named Umunri, are the scions of a remote historical kingdom that once ruled the entire Igbo land. It further advanced the thesis that before the coming of the Nri, the Igbo as an ethnic group had no culture defined as Igbo except what the Nri introduced to become what is defined today as Igbo culture. By this definition of origin, Politics, Culture, and Origins in Nigeria posits that the Nri were not originally Igbo but recent immigrants from Igala kingdom of Idah who arrived in the early sixteenth century and that the Nri origin myth is factually and historically invalid.