Igbo - Definition and Overview

The Ibo are a group of people living in what is now Nigeria.Their language is Igbo.

Before the arrival of Europeans the Ibo were a much more diffuse group, speaking dialects that were almost unintelligible to the Europeans. Their shared culture and religion was also minimal. The Ibo had no name for themselves and most evidence shows they did not consider themselves a group. The arrival of the British in the 1870s lead to a division of Nigeria into several British assigned tribes, one of these being the Ibo. Tribes were treated as being uniform by the colonial government and the diversity within the group slowly decreased and distinctions between and hostility towards neighbouring groups, such as the Yoruba became sharper. These divisions reached an apex in 1967 with the secession of several Ibo-dominated states from Nigeria to form the Republic of Biafra, which lasted only until 1970.

Author Chinua Achebe focuses on the culture in his best-selling novel, Things Fall Apart. Their language also relies heavily on the usage of idioms and metaphors in everyday speech.

See also: Ibo mythology