The researchers, writers, community members, and knowledge-keepers who build and contribute to Mkomigbo.
Who Builds Mkomigbo
Mkomigbo is built by people with roots in Igbo communities — in Igboland itself, in the Nigerian diaspora in Britain, the United States, Canada, and continental Europe, and in the broader African academic and cultural community. Contributors include trained historians and linguists, community elders who carry oral knowledge, diaspora professionals who bring their fields' expertise to Igbo questions, and anyone with honest knowledge to contribute.
The platform is deliberately not built around a single author or a single institution. Igbo knowledge is communal — it is produced and held by communities, not by individuals — and the platform reflects this. Different pages carry different voices, different emphases, and different areas of expertise. The overall editorial standard — accuracy, sourcing, honesty about uncertainty — is consistent, but the individual expression varies with the contributor.
The Editorial Standard
Every page on Mkomigbo is held to the same standard: claims must be supportable, sources must be identified or identifiable, and uncertainty must be acknowledged rather than concealed. Where scholars disagree — about dates, about the scale of the slave trade, about the causes of the Biafra war, about the interpretation of Igbo cosmology — the disagreement is documented rather than resolved by editorial fiat. The goal is to give readers the information they need to think for themselves, not to tell them what to think.
This standard is demanding and imperfectly achieved. No project of this scale is without errors. When errors are identified — by contributors, by readers, by specialists — they are corrected. The correction history is part of the record. Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that our understanding changes as evidence accumulates and as new voices enter the conversation.
Community Knowledge
Some of the most important knowledge on Mkomigbo cannot be fully sourced in the academic sense because it comes from community knowledge — from elders who know their lineage histories, from masquerade societies whose practices are not written down, from women's associations whose oral traditions have never been archived, from dibia whose medicine and divination knowledge is transmitted through apprenticeship rather than publication. We treat this knowledge with the same seriousness as published scholarship while being transparent about its nature and its limitations.
Community knowledge is not less reliable than academic knowledge — it is differently reliable. It has survived through oral transmission across generations, which means it has been tested and corrected by community use over time. But it is also subject to the distortions of memory, of political interest, and of the particular perspective of the community that holds it. Both academic and community knowledge require critical reading; neither should be accepted uncritically or dismissed without examination.
How to Contribute
If you have knowledge that belongs on Mkomigbo — historical research, community knowledge, oral history, photographs, documents, linguistic expertise, or expertise in any of the subjects covered here — we want to hear from you. The platform is designed so that individual knowledge, however specialised, can find its place and be preserved for future generations.
Contributions go through an editorial review for accuracy and sourcing before publication. We cannot publish everything submitted, but we take every contribution seriously and respond to all submissions. The standard for publication is not perfection but honesty: accurate as far as the contributor knows, sourced as fully as possible, and transparent about what is uncertain.