11/01/2024
"Nobody is Igbo but everyone is Igbo" this statements might sound funny but it's true. The word Igbo actually means human being ( Mmadu) in Mmaku dialect, it was a man called Anaeke Mmadu who started using the word Igbo to replace his father's name (Mmadu) when he was trying to criticise the activities of people (Mmadu) during the old time for incessant fighting of war and destroying of properties , communities against another, some communities were wiped out by superior ones and occupied their land. Anaeke started criticising that activities of war and started going from one place to another and asking them to embrace peace . During that time we were all identified by our clan names and generally as Mmadu. To avoid sounding as if he is criticising his own father which is coincidentally called Mmadu, he invented the word Igbo to replace Mmadu. He would say " Ndu Igbo na-egbu onwe we " that people are killing themselves and they should stop killing themselves. He was in diffrent places/clans like, Agbaja, eru, olu, Ubulu etc for the peaceful evangelism. This is when the word Igbo went viral and people started using it to identity us. Integration, association, and assimilation made us Ndigbo not ancestry. The integration continued spreading to every direction until white people came and started creating borders and rest of them which halted the widespread, this is the reason why if you go to all the borders of Igboland you will see people who are dragging if they are Ndigbo or not, some of them were not properly integrated. Anyone who claims to be Igbo more than another person is actually an ignorant or community claiming to be progenitor of Igbo is really ignorant communities.
Ọzọ Ìgwè ✍️🏿