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Nigeria The Igbo: A Stateless Society?
Most scholars have argued that Igbo society was
"stateless"
and that the Igbo region did not evolve centralized
political
institutions before the colonial period. According to this
theory, the relatively egalitarian Igbo lived in small,
selfcontained groups of villages organized according to a
lineage
system that did not allow social stratification. An
individual's
fitness to govern was determined by his wisdom and his
wisdom by
his age and experience. Subsistence farming was the
dominant
economic activity, and yams were the staple crop. Land,
obtained
through inheritance, was the measure of wealth.
Handicrafts and
commerce were well developed, and a relatively dense
population
characterized the region.
Despite the absence of chiefs, some Igbo relied on an
order
of priests, chosen from outsiders on the northern fringe
of
Igboland, to ensure impartiality in settling disputes
between
communities. Igbo gods, like those of the Yoruba, were
numerous,
but their relationship to one another and to human beings
was
essentially egalitarian, thereby reflecting Igbo society
as a
whole. A number of oracles and local cults attracted
devotees,
while the central deity, the earth mother and fertility
figure,
Ala, was venerated at shrines throughout Igboland.
The weakness of this theory of statelessness rests on
the
paucity of historical evidence of precolonial Igbo
society. There
are huge lacunae between the archaeological finds of Igbo
Ukwu,
which reveal a rich material culture in the heart of the
Igbo
region in the eighth century A.D., and the oral traditions
of the
twentieth century. In particular, the importance of the
Nri
Kingdom, which appears to have flourished before the
seventeenth
century, often is overlooked. The Nri Kingdom was
relatively
small in geographical extent, but it is remembered as the
cradle
of Igbo culture. Finally, Benin exercised considerable
influence
on the western Igbo, who adopted many of the political
structures
familiar to the Yoruba-Benin region.
Data as of June 1991
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