Ozibo Ozibo

Ozibo Ozibo is a PhD Candidate of African History in the Department of History at Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing, Michigan, United States. He is an Africanist historian, journalist and writer.

Ozibo’s research interests cut across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries West African historiography, social, economic and environmental history, as well as the Atlantic World. His doctoral dissertation, “Abakaliki Rice: Gendered Labor, Diet Transformation and the Making of Identities in Eastern Nigeria, 1942-1967” focuses on the history of rice cultivation in Eastern Nigeria: how the introduction of rice from British Guyana and its successful domestication in Abakaliki engendered cultural, social and economic changes in colonial and postcolonial Eastern Nigeria between 1942 and 1967. In the context of British colonial agricultural policies, he explores the gender dynamics in farm labor, changes in diets and feeding habits occasioned by the peoples’ shift from yam to rice as favored staple food, and how Abakaliki farmers used rice culture to negotiate complex relationships and social identities in Eastern Nigeria.

Before coming to the United States in 2019, Ozibo worked as an Investigative Political Reporter with an Abuja-based, leading Nigerian newspaper, Daily Trust, where he covered the Nigerian Parliament (National Assembly).

In 2016, he graduated with a B.A. (Summa Cum Laude) in History from Nigeria’s premier university, the University of Ibadan, becoming the first person to so graduate from the Ibadan School of History since the foundation of the institution in 1948. For breaking a 69-year-old academic jinx, he was bestowed with twelve academic prizes, including the distinguished “University Scholar Award,” which entitled him to an M.A. scholarship at the university.

Ozibo also holds a B.A. in Mass Communication from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he aspires to become a public intellectual: a professor of African History and African Studies who is committed to research, scholarship and training of Africanist scholars. He is proficient in Igbo and English and an ardent soccer fan.