About

I'm Chiadikobi Nwaubani. I am a native of Umukabia Okpuala, in Okaiuga, Umuahia. My ìbennē, or motherland, is in Agbọ̀ Ị̀ka, in today's Delta State. My ancestry incorporates ndị Ìgbò at extreme ends of our cultural spectrum and continuum, as well as geography. I was born in London, but lived formative childhood years between London and Nigeria, Alaigbo for the most part, and Lagos. I started this blog in 2010, in my late teens, as a way of cataloguing pre-1940s images of the Igbo cultural area and other surrounding areas, many of the images I had been studying years before, focusing on indigenous life and creativity, 300,000 years in the making. My driving motivation were the misconceptions I was taught about the history of ndị Ìgbò and black Africans in the wider context. There was a concerted and concentrated effort to compleely discredit the humanity of our forefahers by those who marked them out for extraction and exploitation, some time has passed since then, but the damage and most importantly, the habits of self-harm and lack of true self knowledge, has been absorbed and persists. These misconceptions also permeate Nigerian media and popular culture, including folk history.

Various indigenous histories were also self-censored and excised for status quo, especially in the contexts of spirituality, women, gender, and sexuality, since they came to be considered unseemly, untoward, or embarassingly outré to the new order, namely a colonial-Christian one. I don't claim to wholly and appropriately address these hstorical imbalances and distortions, but, hey, a try is a try. This is a topic that can be written on at book length, but I'll leave it here as an introduction lightly detailing the motivations behind the creation of this space for over a decade; the blog addresses these issues in direct and indirect ways.

On my end, this has been a learning process more than it has been an experience of me teaching, showing, and telling. This has become more than a blog now; the impact of this space, to a certain extent, was planned, but expressions of this impact are surprising, still.

This blog also contains images from other online archives. To contact me, email: so.ukpuru@gmail.com.