The igbo: “a stateless society”

Abstract

For sometime now there have arisen some interests and controversies among scholars and observers as to whether the Igbo had a political system that could be considered centralized. Some scholars and opinion are of the view that the Igbo did not organize themselves into states and so, had no kingship institution. In other words, the Igbo political institutions and structures did not constitute credentials of statehood. The British anthropologists and colonial administrators with limited knowledge of the type of government in Igboland have tended to classify the people as a stateless society. To them, what existed were federations of autonomous villages without any single individual endowed with the attributes of a king or ruler as was the case with the Benin kingdom, the Empires of Oyo and Kanem Borno, and the Hausa States. The purpose of this study is to interrogate the appropriateness or otherwise of this assumption because the people’s institutions and structures met their aspirations just as those of the so-called states in the pre-colonial days. The paper is a departure from the widely held but misleading conceptions and stereotypes about the Igbo political system before the colonial era.