On Friday December 11, 2009, Brown University hosted an international colloquium on Africa in honor of Prof. Chinua Achebe. According to Brown University, this colloquium is vital because Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and accounts for more than half of West Africa’s population. Home to about one in five Africans, Nigeria is also the United States’s largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa, supplying 11 percent of U.S. oil imports and making Nigeria the fifth-largest exporter of oil to the United States.

Among those that attended the conference were: Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (Ikemba Nnewi), Prof. Wole Soyinka, Gov. Peter Obi, Prof. Obiora Udechukwu and Atty. Femi Falana.

Read more about this important event here.

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Igbo Village

Friday, July 10 was the twenty-ninth day of construction of the 1700s West African Farm and the last day, at least for a few weeks, that we had the daily guidance and instruction of the Reverend Dr. Stanislaus Maduawuchi Ogbonna. Stan’s a Catholic priest, psychologist, and independent scholar of Igbo culture who took a month and few days off from his other jobs to help us with our exhibit construction project. According to Dr. Maduabuchi, "The progress we made during his time with us has been all we hoped for and more." One house, the obi (the Compound Head’s day house), is substantially complete, the walls of the First Wife’s house are almost to the height where the gables can begin, and the foundations of the Compound Head’s private house are above ground level and rising as I write. ~Read More~